On 27 February 2012 15:09, Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Yes, I've seen it. As Gerry says, it is an extension of Guy Steele's
> thesis. When I read this, I wished for a more interesting, comprehensive
> and wider-ranging and -scaling example to help think with.
>

For me, the moment of enlightenment was when I realized that by using a
lattice at each node, they'd abstracted out the essence of
"iterate-to-fixpoint" that's *disguised within* a number of the examples I
mentioned in my previous message. (Particularly the frameworks of abstract
interpretation.)

I'm also really keen to try to relate propagators to Joe Hellerstein's
recent work on BOOM/BLOOM. That team has been able to implement the Chord
DHT in fewer than 50 lines of code. The underlying fact-propagation system
of their language integrates with a Datalog-based reasoner to permit terse,
dense reasoning about distributed state.


> One reason to put up with some of the problems of defining things using
> constraints is that if you can organize things well enough, you get super
> clarity and simplicity and power.
>

Absolutely. I think Hellerstein's Chord example shows that very well. So I
wish it had been an example in Radul's thesis :-)


> With regard to objects, my current prejudice is that "objects should be
> able to receive messages, but should not have to send to explicit
> receivers". This is a kind of multi-cast I guess (but I think of it more
> like publish/subscribe).
>

I'm nearing the point where I can write up the results of a chunk of my
current research. We have been using a pub/sub-based virtual machine for
actor-like entities, and have found a few cool uses of non-point-to-point
message passing that simplify implementation of complex protocols like DNS
and SSH.

Regards,
  Tony
-- 
Tony Garnock-Jones
tonygarnockjo...@gmail.com
http://homepages.kcbbs.gen.nz/tonyg/
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