Re: Question about E's history.

On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 7:47 PM, Jonathan Rees <[email protected]> wrote:

> Is this relevant as precedent? It was pretty well developed by 1984
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MultiLisp
>

Their promises were blocking, as were many other promises adapted to
sequential languages. Among such blocking promises for sequential languages,
their's many have be innovative -- I don't know. But in regards to the
issues raised in this thread, no I don't think it was first on anything
relevant.

The overall language's concurrency is essentially shared memory
multithreading added to Scheme. Even though promises could have help them
avoid the shared memory mistake, they didn't.



> but I don't know how well developed it was regarding pipelining.
>

It had no pipelining.


> I suspect they got the 'promise' idea from Hewitt.
>

Yes. Hewitt and Baker.


>
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MultiLisp>Jonathan
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MultiLisp>
> On Jun 11, 2011, at 4:23 PM, Mark S. Miller wrote:
>
> On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 12:01 PM, Tom Van Cutsem <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>> Hi Constantine,
>>
>> Having looked at various actor languages, I have not previously
>> encountered the type of asynchronous composability that when-expressions
>> provide. So E may be the first language to have introduced this feature.
>>
>> About E's origins: in the paper "Concurrency among strangers", there is a
>> section titled "From objects to actors and back again" (section 11) which I
>> feel is a good reference to work that inspired E: <
>> http://www.erights.org/talks/promises/index.html>
>>
>> In general, I believe the actor model served as the greatest source of
>> inspiration for E: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model>
>>
>> I know from Mark that promises in Liskov's Argus language were also a
>> source of inspiration for promises in E.
>>
>
> Not inspiration, but precedence and therefore credit. In 1989, Dean, I, and
> others independently came up with a promise pipelining model similar to
> Liskov and Shrira's promises as part of the Xanadu (aka Udanax Gold) work <
> http://web.archive.org/web/20071023111712/http://www.sunless-sea.net/Transcripts/promise.html>.
> Afterwards, we found out about their 1988 paper <
> http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?idT016>, and so have consistently given
> them credit for inventing the idea first, as they did.
>
> ...
>
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>


-- 
    Cheers,
    --MarkM

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