On Tue 28 Sep, Bjorn Lisper wrote:
> This is not to discourage you (I think your idea is quite interesting), but
> the parallel or actually provided a big headache to early researchers in
> semantics. It pops up in the standard functional domains used for
> denotational semantics and its non-sequential nature was seen as kind of
> unnatural. (For instance, it cannot be encoded in the lambda calculus.)
I was wondering wether this sort of thing made lambda calculus obsolete:-)
> Great efforts were spent do define function domains where non-sequential
> functions like the parallel or did not exist. I don't think these efforts
> really ever succeeded.
>
> I have always felt that these efforts were somewhat misguided.
> (Theoreticians out there, please don't kill me!) There is nothing strange
> with parallel threads, or a function that requires parallel threads for its
> faithful implementation.
To me it seems quite natural. I'm from an electronics background
and electronic circuits are inherently concurrent. To think of them any
other way is strange. My own (probably naive) attempts to develop
parallel pattern matching involve translating function definitions into
'pattern matching circuits' rather than case expressions. It reminds
me of asynchronous logic design.
Regards
--
Adrian Hey
