Proposal: Control.Concurrent.Async

[wren ng thornton]

On 6/15/12 9:31 AM, Simon Marlow wrote:
> On 14/06/2012 22:54, Lauri Alanko wrote:
>> Quoting "Simon Marlow" <marlowsd at gmail.com>:
>>> Naming is obviously up for discussion too.
>>
>> I feel that "Async" is a bit too generic and doesn't very precisely
>> characterize this particular construct. How about "Future", as similar
>> things are called in e.g. Alice
>> <http://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/alice/manual/futures.html> and Java
>> <http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/FutureTask.html>?
>>
>
> "Future" evokes notions of parallelism for me, rather than concurrency.
> I think the term is more often used in a parallel setting.
>
> There's a precedent for using 'async' for concurrency: see the new C#
> and F# async extensions:
>
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh191443%28v=vs.110%29.aspx
>
> But naming is hard, and if everyone wanted to use "future" instead I
> wouldn't object very strongly.

I object to "future" as using an overly general term for one very 
particular instantiation of it. At the very least it must be qualified 
as "concurrent future". Though I'm not particularly opposed to "async"; 
and if there's precedent, then all the better.

-- 
Live well,
~wren