[EMAIL PROTECTED] schrieb:
Joachim Durchholz wrote:
I'll move on to the alternatives - Alice ML and/or Clean. Both can
serialize without forcing lazy subexpressions.
I don't know about Clean, but with respect to Alice ML this is not
correct: Alice ML uniformly blocks on futures upon pickling,
including lazy ones.
Bad enough, but not necessarily a showstopper: lazy data structures
aren't idiomatic in ML (I just hope they aren't in Alice ML either).
Sometimes you may want to pickle lazy suspensions as such, but more
often it is not what you want. In particular, the suspension can
easily be larger than its result,
I'd say that in this case, the suspension should have been forced
earlier. I.e. the problem is not in the pickling but in the suspension
being larger than its result.
I'm entirely unsure how to determine when a suspension should be forced
anway. The programmer could give hints, but that would probably break
all kinds of abstraction barrier; and the system usually doesn't have
enough information to decide when it should do it. Seems like one of
those problems that generate lots of PhD papers...
and the closure may contain resources which cannot be pickled. If
such a suspension was produced by an abstraction you may even argue
that making contained resources observable partially breaks the
abstraction.
Well, Alice ML doesn't serialize things that don't make sense outside
the originating process (i.e. resources).
That's better than silently serializing a file handle and being
surprised by that handle meaning an entirely different file after
unpickling.
OTOH one could do even better. Simply unpickle a resource as a proxy for
the original resource in the originating process. (If the process has
died, assume that the resource was closed - the vast majority of
resource types has a "closed/unusable" state anyway.)
To adhere to uniformity, strong abstraction, and the Principle of
Least Surprise, we thus chose to force lazy futures in Alice ML.
Well, I wouldn't have expected that pickling has an effect (other than
wrapping the value up for transfer), so at least I would have been
greatly surprised.
I even dislike to see something like that in a language that has side
effects.
But you can't have everything anyway ;-)
Regards,
Jo
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