[Haskell-cafe] Pike's Newsqueak talk

[Tim Newsham]

I just watched http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=810232012617965344

It's a great talk that is suprisingly relevant to Haskell programming 
(although at first blush it looks a bit unrelated). (It refs a lot of 
older work that actually led me to Haskell in the first place by way of 
McIlroy's haskell power-series paper).  Anyway, I thought it would be of 
general interest.

A lot of the progrms he discusses are a lot more elegant in pure Haskell 
code (ie. prime number sieve, power series), but his language also 
supports an interesting imperative primitive that lets you pick the first 
available value from a set of channels which isn't available in pure 
Haskell expressions.  Has anyone implemented a primitive like this for 
Haskell?

Tim Newsham
http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/