Re: Proposal: Control.Concurrent.Async

On 16 June 2012 13:26, wren ng thornton wrote:

On 6/15/12 9:31 AM, Simon Marlow wrote:

...

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.

I object to "future" as using an overly general term for one very particular instantiation of it. At the very least it must be qualified as "concurrent future". Though I'm not particularly opposed to "async"; and if there's precedent, then all the better.

"future" also seems to me to be more about waiting for the result value, not about doing something concurrently. Then again I work on a codebase which involves financial futures contracts, which also involve waiting for a return value ... Conrad.