[Haskell-cafe] Re: Pike's Newsqueak talk

[Tim Newsham]

> Tim Newsham <newsham at lava.net> wrote in article <Pine.BSI.4.64.0906051510070.14634 at malasada.lava.net> in gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe:
>> 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?
>
> Could it be the "amb" described at
>    http://conal.net/blog/posts/functional-concurrency-with-unambiguous-choice/
>    http://conal.net/blog/posts/smarter-termination-for-thread-racing/
> ?

It reminds me a little of unamb but is different.  Unamb is pure
and picks the first computed value of several consistent computations.
The select operator picks the first available value from a set of diff
channels, some of which may have diff types and so is definitely
not pure.

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