[erlang-questions] Service platform (longish rant)

[Vlad Dumitrescu]

Hi,

On 5/8/07, Joe Armstrong <erlang@REDACTED> wrote:
> When you do "A | B | C" the pipe symbol is really hiding a lot of significant
>  detail. The pipe is really a rather complicated thing which hides all sorts of
> details like flow-control, buffering etc.  I can imagine a more complex notation
>
> Suppose we can "open up" the "|" operator, so we can see inside
>
> The A | B really means
>
>             A |< P >| B
>
> Where P is a process
>
>         P(A, B) := A ? M -> B ! M, P(A,B)

Very good points. Up to here I have similar ideas, but didn't want to
get into much details especially since there's a lot more to think
about. There are also other ways to implement this (for example,
depending on what the exact requirements are, the hidden process need
not be a real process but can be simulated with continuation passing)

The even more generic step, for a global queue service, I hadn't
considered, but it feels important to do that, as from a customer
point of view this use case has more impact than "just" some syntax to
make things easier for programmers :-)

Thanks for the input!
best regards,
Vlad