[erlang-questions] Ideas for a new Erlang

[Ulf Wiger]

2008/6/26 Sven-Olof Nystr|m <svenolof@REDACTED>:
> Richard A. O'Keefe writes:
>
>  > The thing that strikes me forcibly is that I have seen
>  > all this before.  John Reppy's Concurrent ML.  It's
>  > supported in SML/NJ and Mlton and perhaps other ML
>  > implementations.  What Nystrom calls a "channel" is
>  > what CML calls a "mailbox".  (What CML calls a "channel"
>  > is what Occam calls a "channel".)  And comparing the CML
>  > code I've seen to Erlang makes Erlang look stunningly
>  > simple *in use*.
>
> True, many languages have a channel concept.
>
> In my opinion, one great advantage of Erlang over other languages that
> use channels is that in Erlang, each process has a "standard" channel
> that it normally takes input from. I hope that I was not unclear about
> this, but that is a feature of Erlang that I had not intended to change.

But if one of the reasons for wanting channels rather than selective
receive on a single mailbox is to make it easier to reason about
concurrency, wouldn't keeping an "unscoped" default channel
complicate this reasoning?

It's a bit like saying "global variables are bad, so we'll introduce
local variables - but global variables are great, so you can have
them too."

BR,
Ulf W