Coroutines

[Ross Paterson]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 06:07:25PM +0100, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> The sort of lazy evaluation employed in [Hannah's] solution is in a
> way similar to coroutines, with the following restrictions (correct
> me if I'm wrong):
> 
> * It is not possible to implement cyclic communication.

It certainly is, and that seems to me a neat way to do process-driven
simulation: a process generates a list of future events, which a controller
merges into its pool, from which it selects the next event to simulate,
starting the next process, and so on.  You could use a monad to hide the
event output if required.

> * It is not possible to implement processes with multiple asynchronous
>   output channels.

Again, should be no problem, but what do you need these for?

> I really would like to preserve the elegance of simulations in Simula, but
> with all the advantages Haskell offers. I believe that in current Haskell
> implementations all the components needed for "proper" coroutines are more
> or less there (because lazy evaluation is pretty close).

Indeed, you may be able to do all the simulation primitives in pure
Haskell, if you take a step back from the channel view.