Dave Whipp wrote: > No, you're not the only person thinking Occam ... though I should point > out that none of my suggestions are "par" blocks -- a par block made > every statement within the block execute in parallel with the other > statements in that block (much like a Verilog fork/join pair).
No; that was me. Although, as Luke pointed out, I wasn't thinking "parallel execution" so much as "arbitrarily ordered execution" (which, as Dave points out, is a prerequisite for true parallel execution). Paul Seamons wrote: > > I disagree with the idea that humans don't think concurrently (though > > more often they think in terms of data dependencies). > > I think this is more analogous to event based programming rather than parallel > programming. Event based and parallel based have some similarities but the > are fundamentally different. Humans typically interact with events and only > occasionally are able to walk and chew gum at the same time. As a human (as opposed to that weird creature known as a "professional programmer"), I tend to do one thing at a time, though I'm more than capable of prioritizing a set of tasks that are handed to me, even if new tasks are added to my workload while I'm still working on others. And if I'm working as part of a team, I know how to delegate tasks to others. As Dave points out, it isn't parallelism that's hard so much as it is coordination with the rest of the team in order to prevent conflicts involving shared resources. -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang
