Damian (>>), Matt (>): >> Perhaps we need to think more Perlishly and reframe the entire question. >> Not: "What threading model do we need?", but: "What kinds of non-sequential >> programming tasks do we want to make easy...and how would we like to be >> able to specify those tasks?" > > I watched a presentation by Guy Steele at the Strange Loop conference on > Thursday where he talked about non-sequential programming. One of the > interesting things that he mentioned was to use the algebraic properties of an > operation to know when a large grouping of operations can be done > non-sequentially. > For example, we know that the meta reduction operator could take very large >lists > and split them into smaller lists across all available cores when performing > certain > operations, like addition and multiplication. If we could mark new operators > that > we create with this knowledge we could do this for custom operators too. > This isn't > a new idea, but it seems like it would be a helpful tool in simplifying > non-sequential > programming and I didn't see it mentioned in this thread yet.
This idea seems to be in the air somehow. (Even though all copies of the meme might have its roots in that Guy you mention.) <http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2010-10-15#i_2914961> Perl 6 has all the prerequisites for making this happen. It's mostly a question of marking things up with some trait or other. our multi sub infix:<+>($a, $b) will optimize<associativity> { ... } (User-defined ops can be markes in exactly the same way.) All that's needed after that is a &reduce sub that's sensitive to such traits. Oh, and threads. // Carl
