Hi Alan,

On 27 February 2012 11:32, Alan Kay <[email protected]> wrote:

> [...] a better constraint system. [...] This has led us to start putting
> constraint engines into STEPS, thinking about how to automatically organize
> various solvers, what kinds of POLs would be nice to make constraint
> systems with, UIs for same, and so forth.
>

Have you looked into the "Propagators" of Radul and Sussman? For example,
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/44215. His approach is closely related
to dataflow, with a lattice defined at each node in the graph for
integrating the messages that are sent to it. He's built FRP systems, type
checkers, type inferencers, abstract interpretation systems and lots of
other fun things in a nice, simple way, out of this core construct that
he's placed near the heart of his language's semantics.

My interest in it came out of thinking about integrating pub/sub (multi-
and broadcast) messaging into the heart of a language. What would a
Smalltalk look like if, instead of a strict unicast model with multi- and
broadcast constructed atop (via Observer/Observable), it had a messaging
model capable of natively expressing unicast, anycast, multicast, and
broadcast patterns? Objects would be able to collaborate on responding to
requests... anycast could be used to provide contextual responses to
requests... concurrency would be smoothly integrable... more research to be
done :-)

Regards,
  Tony
-- 
Tony Garnock-Jones
[email protected]
http://homepages.kcbbs.gen.nz/tonyg/
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