Re: [stack] Why is point-free form so interesting?

stevan apter <[email protected]> wrote:
> William Tanksley, Jr wrote:
> > None of them have multisets, which I'm starting to think may be
> > semantically important for true out-of-order dataflow. It's fine to
> > imagine that an array iteration is order-independent, but arrays are
> > actually ordered.
> i'm not following this.
> a list has an order but you can ignore it.

Yes, but iteration over a list is ordered. That's the sort of minor
distinction that can wind up making a difference in a heavy
computation; especially since we're talking about a notation that's
supposed to clearly express the idea of unordered dataflows.

Perhaps I could define implicit iteration to be unordered; thus,
although the programmer is free (indeed, is required) to order arrays,
the runtime won't promise anything about how the arrays get unpacked
automatically.

There's a lot of possible implementations.

Of course, I'm not sure if my idea is a solution _at all_, so I'm a
little leery of getting too much into the details.

-Billy