Concurrency in Slate

Sat Mar 23 16:57:31 PST 2002

<!x-stuff-for-pete id="0">
<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN">
<html><head><style type="text/css"><!--
blockquote, dl, ul, ol, li { margin-top: 0 ; margin-bottom: 0 }
 --></style><title>Re: Concurrency in Slate</title></head><body>
<div>At 07:50 PM 6/5/00 -0700, Alex Kravets wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Brian, first of all, I'd like to express
my admiration for<br>
the ambitious project you guys are undertaking with Slate.<br>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
Thanks. Maybe someday I'll actually be making money on this. ;)<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>I'm extremely impressed with the set of
ideas you decided to<br>
borrow from other experimental languages to implement in Slate.<br>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
Again, thanks. I'm really pushing hard to make it come together right,
and there have been quite a few delays due to trying to satisfy Tunes
HLL documentation to the nearest extent possible. There will be a new
set of documentation soon that will provide a very conrete explanation
of all the ideas I have compiled and what that will translate to for
the user of the language and how an implementation can satisfy the
specification. (This is very time-consuming, as you might imagine.
We're also migrating the Tunes site documentation as well as the Slate
and Arrow documentation to a new, more flexible system.)<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>I noticed that in the Slate semantics
page you state:<br>
<br>
Update: The option for a lazy functional language to use
demand-driven<br>
concurrency control in a way that makes concurrency and distribution
issues<br>
transparent and subject to data-flow dependencies. In this way,
everything<br>
is a thread that can be orthogonally-distributed. This allows for all
of the<br>
concurrency semantics one could wish for with a clean basis.<br>
Is it correct to assume that you decide to adopt a wait-by-necessity
model<br>
akin to that proposed by Eifell // at:<br>
http://www.eiffel.com/doc/manuals/technology/concurrency/<br>
also discussed within the Merlin Project at:<br>
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.lsi.usp.br/~jecel/selfdiff.h<span
></span>tml+wai<br>
t-by-necessity&amp;hl=en<br>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
Yes, that's correct. However, there's of course some indeterminacy
that we would like to open up to the programmer through an aspect of
the reflective interface (the MOP). Of course data-flow dependencies
provide you a framework of constraints for code scheduling, but there
should be a way to open up the mechanisms of the scheduling and change
them. For technical detail, look at papers on term rewrite as a
meta-language for expressing various modes of concurrency
specification (up to and including real-time systems
specifications).<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Cheers ...<br>
<br>
Alex Kravets, Lead Architect<br>
http://www.FirstLook.com/<br>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
Thanks,<br>
~</div>
</body>
</html>