Andrew Coppin wrote:
[...] if you could send a block of code from one PC to another to execute it remotely.
Eden can do this. http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~eden/ Eden is a distributed Haskell: You run multiple copies of the same binary on different machines, and you have the (#) operator to apply functions *on a remote machine*. So, for example, process (map f) # xs will serialize (map f) and send it over to some other machine. At that other machine, (map f) is deserialized and evaluated. In addition, two channels between the machines are opened: One for streaming the xs to that remote machine where the map is executed, and one for streaming the results back. The process and (#) operators have the following, rather harmless looking types: process :: (a -> b) -> Process a b (#) :: Process a b -> (a -> b) So no IO around, even if there is serialization and network communication going on. If you feel uncomfortable about that, you can use instantiate instead: instantiate :: Process a b -> a -> IO b And indeed, (#) is implemented in terms of instantiate and that unspeakable source of all false transparency: p # x = unsafePerformIO (instantiate p x) Tillmann