lab 31 - accumulator generator in limbo

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lab 31 - accumulator generator in limbo

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In lab 25 I tried to tackle the problem of writing an accumulator generator in the languages available on inferno. I blithely assumed it wasn't possible in Inferno. I'm happy to say I was wrong. Roger Peppe emailed me the answers, so I'm just reporting what he gave me. But it was very enlightening, a big Aha!, and made me view limbo in a different way.

From rog: "funny thing is, it *is* possible in limbo, if you take a somewhat more liberal definition of the term "function". recall that a limbo channel can act like a function: e.g. 

       c: chan of (int, chan of string);

"can represent a function that takes an int and returns a string (through the reply channel). 

       c <-= (99, reply := chan of string);
       sys->print("result is %s\n", <-reply);

"i've attached a Limbo version of the accumulator-generator that uses this kind of thing. i'll leave it to you to decide if this fulfils Greenspun's rule or not!"

I said it doesn't strictly pass the test because you are passing an integer not a number. Rog replied: "ahhh but it can if i want it to! (i really like inferno's parametric types... note the accgen and acc functions could be in an external module)."

Around the same time as Rog sent me this I was also reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, in particular the sections on delayed (or lazy) lists. The connection of lazy lists to functional programming and to channels in inferno was made complete by Doug Mcilroy's paper, Squinting the Power Series. I ported the code, original in newsqueak, to inferno, to absorb the lessons from this. I recommend all inferno programmers go read this paper and study the code.

Where from here? I tried to apply what I'd learned. I created a tool for querying a little database. The query is made by chaining processes in a similar manner as the power series code. I'll be posting this code at a later time, as I hope to incorporate it into the folkonomy fs.

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