> So in the result of (a >>= f), the first element is taken from the
> first element of applying f to the first element of a; the second
> element is the second element in the result of applying f to the second
> element of a; and so on. Off the top of my head I am not sure what
> this corresponds to in terms of agents or where it would be useful,
> but I'm sure it must correspond to something interesting.
In short, join corresponds to continuously sampling a stream of streams.
In other words, it turns a higher-order stream into a dynamic data-flow
network. That's exactly what the Elerea library [1] is good for: it
allows you to do this in constant time instead of the quadratic cost of
the pure implementation, but it forces you to traverse streams
sequentially -- fortunately, that's exactly what you want to do most of
the time. There is also a paper behind the library, which might help a
bit in getting a clearer picture [2] (the paper also has an updated
version in the process of being published).
Gergely
[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/elerea
[2]
http://sgate.emt.bme.hu/documents/patai/publications/PataiWFLP2010.pdf
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