Re: Proposal: Control.Concurrent.Async

On 14/06/2012 22:54, Lauri Alanko wrote:

Quoting "Simon Marlow" :

...

Naming is obviously up for discussion too.

I feel that "Async" is a bit too generic and doesn't very precisely characterize this particular construct. How about "Future", as similar things are called in e.g. Alice http://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/alice/manual/futures.html and Java http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/FutureTask.htm...?

"Future" evokes notions of parallelism for me, rather than concurrency. I think the term is more often used in a parallel setting. There's a precedent for using 'async' for concurrency: see the new C# and F# async extensions: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh191443%28v=vs.110%29.aspx But naming is hard, and if everyone wanted to use "future" instead I wouldn't object very strongly. Cheers, Simon