[Haskell-cafe] Monads in Scala, XSLT, Unix shell pipes was Re: Monads in ...

[Greg Woodhouse]

--- Bulat Ziganshin <bulatz at HotPOP.com> wrote:

> Hello Greg,
> 
> for pure functional computations concurrency is just one of
> IMPLEMENTATION mechanisms, and it doesn't appear in abstractions
> DEFINITIONS 
> 

I suppose it depends a bit on the question you're asking. A
multiprocessor, considered as a whole, might be a platform upon which
you wish to implement a functional language. And in a certain sense,
what you do with those processors is an implementation issue. But what
I'm after is compositionality. I have in mind message based physically
distributed systems, where individual components can be thought of as
having well-defined semantics from which the semantics of the system as
a whole can be defined. It's not at all clear (to me, anyway) how to do
this. In a physically distributed system, it seems natural to think of
the other processors, together with the bus(es) or network interfaces
as providing part of the environment, and this leads naturally to the
idea of using a theoretical tool like monads or continuations to model
one of these "components" -- but that doesn't (obviously, at least)
lead to compositional semantics becsuse of the obvious asymmetry.

By way of background, a project I had been working on (untitl the
project was cancelled) was something I dubbed an "interface compiler".
I had developed a number of HL7 interfaces in a traditional imperative
language (HL7, or Health Level 7, is an application protocol used in
healthcare). These "interfaces" were virtually identical in most
respects, so I set out to build a generic engine that would abstract
away from the details of each interface. I was successful and easily
re-implemented the interfaces I had already written using the new
engine. But a little reflection lead me to conclude that this template
driven approach was really higher order programming in disguise
(another factor leading to my renewed interest in functional
programming). Okay, that's fine as far as it goes, but it suffers from
a severe limitation: the computational model is a single network node
communicvating with its environment. There is no obvious way (in
functional terms, at least) to go from the semantics of the subsystems
running on each node to the semantics of the system as a whole. An idea
that I've considered, but not really attempted to elaborate, is to
generate code for the whole system *as a unit*. In retrospect, I see
that this is essentially an attempt to move to the setting you
describe, in which concurrency is simply a design issue.

I have not yet read Misra's monograph (I hope I got that right -- I'm
visiting family and away from my library), but I'm attracted to the
idea that concurrency should not be a design issue and, by
extension(?), that the process is not fundamental. (After all, is it
not an artifact of the operating system?) This strikes a chord with me,
because computation in functional languages is a matter of reduction,
not sequential execution of statements (commands, really). I've been
attracted to reactive systems because they, too, seem to provide a path
to moving beyond the process abstraction, and because I've been working
on TCP/IP based applications for years, and find it all quite
fascinating. But, in a fundamental sense, reactive systems seem to
represent a step in the *opposite* direction. After all, the
appropriate program logic here seems to be temporal logic -- hardly
natural from a functional perspective!

I should apologize (no longer in advance) for the "stream of
consciousness" nature of this post. Think of it as an attempt to pull
together a few seemingly (or maybe not so seemingly) unrelated threads
from my earlier posts.


===
Gregory Woodhouse  <gregory.woodhouse at sbcglobal.net>


"Interaction is the mind-body problem of computing."

--Philip Wadler