Hi, falcon, I wrote (with MikeM) a pair of basic Cell-like libraries in Clojure, one using Refs and one using Agents: http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/d79392e4c79f8cde (code is in the attachments)
In response, Rich added Agent Watches (see same thread), which are like triggers that get called whenever an Agent's value changes. I'm not sure where else to go with this, but I'm interested in talking about it. One thing I was never clear on was the correct transactional behavior. With cells in Refs, modifying a cell blocks until all other cells are up-to-date, which can take time. With cells in Agents, modifying a cell never blocks, but you can't predict the order of events, as I discovered with a simple GUI demo. I know the original Common Lisp version of Cells imposed a global time counter, so it may be a dependency framework rather than a concurrency framework. From Rich: "I don't know anything about Cells, but if it has global time ordering it might not be a good fit for multithreading, and not for agents." -Stuart Sierra On Nov 24, 7:33 pm, falcon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I hope folks here don't mind this post. The following article > explains how to do reactive programming in > F#:http://tomasp.net/blog/reactive-i-fsevents.aspx(the bottom of the > article has links to rest of the articles in the series) > > There has been some recent discussion on CELLs in Clojure. There was > some question of motivation behind 'reactive' programming...I believe > this article makes the ideas a bit more concrete. Since Clojure > already has some features for concurrent programming, I believe the > reactive model should also be easy to accommodate. > > In F#, one can filter/map/reduce events (and much more) just as if > they were operations on a list. How would this be done in cells? How > would one combine or split several cells? > > This type of data-flow programming also brings clojure one step closer > my dream of a super-spreadsheet: Instead of typing out expressions on > an REPL, why not make the REPL non-linear and allow users to enter > expressions in 2-d space (similar to a grid...but without the grid). > Unlike Excel, clojure could also very easily let end-users define > their own functions and use them in expressions (thereby vastly > improving the lack of abstractions in current spread sheets) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
