[Haskell-cafe] parallelism or concurrency ? if they are different

[Paolino]

thanks Henk-Jan, someone just helped me saying that my function is
pure as long as I make a cache of it, indexed on arguments. This
operationally proves that concurrent IO code  can be purified with
unsafePerformIO, when it's semantic is not changed by that kind of
cache. Really doing the cache then it's an implementation choice. It
would be nice to have a suffix for this kind of functions, something
remembering the unrepeatability of them when not cached.

Sorry for my lacks of structure, I did my best.

paolino

2009/2/17, Henk-Jan van Tuyl <hjgtuyl at chello.nl>:
> On Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:09:35 +0100, Paolino <paolo.veronelli at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> When I came to haskell, I arrived with a small and only evolutionary
>> background in programming. First monad I met was MonadState StdGen m.
>> Everything was in someway acceptable, I had no problem in
>> explicitating the need for the generator.
>> The lesson was referential transparency. To me referential tranparency
>> is still obscure as a feature.
>> Not using the monad , my functions pass around a generator, then they
>> are repeatable, same generator , same computation.
>> Years pass by, now evolutionary algorithms need to scale multicores.
>> But multicore can be used with threads or par, the difference is that
>> par is pure, because it respects referential transparency. But threads
>> not.
>> They are always unrespectful ? Or it's an implementation issue of
>> preemptive choice?
>> Can I have a baton to pass around like I had for random generator, so
>> that the computation ends without IO (unsafe performed) , without
>> breaking tranparency,
>> something like (runIOThreads :: ThreadsIO a -> ThreadsBaton -> a) ?
>>> From Real World Haskell my algorithm have to be parallelized as they
>> don't do some kind of IO, they don't deal with the world, but where is
>> it stated that it is possible  to write them with par (I couldn't) ?
>> More , I'm not caring  that my computation is unrepeatable, for me
>> it's fine that  the runtime system  gives me the cached results for
>> same arguments computation. The fact that it doesn't ,and recompute
>> the function giving out something fuzzily different from before, is
>> enough to coerce me to spit out IO  values ?
>> Finally, why and where the optimizer will substitute a value with its
>> definition, so that it possibly get computed twice ?
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> paolino
>
> I am not an expert in this matter, but as nobody answered sofar (perhaps
> people were frightened off by a lack of structure in your text), I will
> try to give some pointers:
>
>   - You can start a function with parameters in a thread like this
>       threadId <- forkIO (foo 42)
>     where foo has type Int -> IO ()
>
>   - Communication between threads can be done with MVars, see:
>
> http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/Control-Concurrent-MVar.html
>
>   - You can find concurrency demos at:
>       http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Concurrency_demos
>
>   - Links to articles about parallelism:
>       http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles/Parallel
>
>   - To prevent recomputing, read:
>       http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Memoization
>
> --
> Regards,
> Henk-Jan van Tuyl
>
>
> --
> http://functor.bamikanarie.com
> http://Van.Tuyl.eu/
> --
>
>
>