On Aug 15, 2009, at 4:59 PM, Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
Your point about safety in C has no relation to safety in a functional language with a sophisticated effect system.
I'm sorry, but I think it does. You're advocating that modifications to mutable state shouldn't have sequential semantics,
You must think I'm arguing for some kind of low-level analog of C, augmented with an effect system. I'm not. You can't do that. To maximize the potential for optimization, you need a high-level language, mostly functional, with a very sophisticated and carefully controlled effects system for expressing imperative actions. If you have threads and shared mutable state, then you might require that any access to shared state be done through an atomic block (STM). The type system would encode if mutable variables can be shared between threads, and if so, the compiler would mandate they be accessed from inside an atomic block. In such conditions, multiple sequential writes can be safely parallelized, in addition to a host of other optimizations.
I'm pointing out that this is the case today in C on many CPUs and it's a royal pain to work with in practice (causing many almost- impossible-to-debug crashes). I would not want functional languages to adopt something that's proven to be insanity-inducingly difficult to use.
Please don't ever bring up C again. You can't do anything interesting in C. Regards, John A. De Goes N-Brain, Inc. The Evolution of Collaboration http://www.n-brain.net | 877-376-2724 x 101