>> - I have no idea what Erlang does...
> 
> You send a message to another process, or receive such a message, which 
> isn't therefore functional as such. Processing the message is (mostly) 
> functional, but the behavior of a collection of processes varies with 
> timing and such.
> 
> Plus, there are processes implemented in C which do non-functional stuff 
> with messages, like write them to stdout.

So it's kinda like SQL - it's basically stateless, except for some 
top-level state mutation. (?)

>> (A Haskell "program" takes an infinite list of I/O responses as input, 
>> and returns an infinite list of I/O requests as output.
> 
> I remember reading about that a long time ago! :-)

Yeah. Frighteningly easy to accidentally get the requests and replies 
out of sync. This means it's also very easy to accidentally try to read 
a response before the request has been sent - also known as a 
"deadlock". :-/

We got rid of that For A Reason(tm). ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message