[erlang-questions] Microsoft developer vision - functional programming

[Cameron Kerr]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2007 at 10:42:42PM +0200, Hugh Perkins wrote:
> On 10/18/07, Ulf Wiger (TN/EAB) <ulf.wiger@REDACTED> wrote:
> > "...ideas from functional languages
> 
> The biggest idea from FP for parallel seems to be daring to copy all
> the data to each thread, rather than letting multiple threads read a
> single central copy.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the benefits of
Erlang's (in particular) single-assignment restriction that you only
need to pass around a pointer, and never need to copy the data (because
the data cannot be modified once it is first assigned). Obviously, you
would need to copy the data if sending to a different machine.

-- 
Cameron Kerr <ckerr@REDACTED>
Telecommunications Teaching Fellow
University of Otago, New Zealand