Dreams.

[Patrick Phalen]

On Sat, 10 Jul 1999, Tim Peters wrote:

> I expect you could get most of this with little effort and little cost under
> Unix via fork and a little IPC:  fork the process and try the speculative
> stuff in the child, while the parent waits for the child to tell it how
> things turned out.  If the child is happy, it tells the parent to die; if
> the child has a nightmare, it kills itself after telling the parent "it was
> all a bad dream", and the parent goes on as if nothing had happened. 

This is rich with possibilities. By extension, one could model the
entire human collective unconscious, through a selective rereading of
Carl Jung's and Erich Neumann's work on dreams and archetypes. Write a
Python class for each of the plots of the pertinent Greek tragedies
(Oedipus, Phaedra, etc.). Maybe throw in King Lear for the situation
where the parent process hangs and doesn't listen to its child. And
Hamlet, of course, for when the parent dies prematurely and the child
encounters an undecidable problem. 

message-queues-and-event-flags-are-
	pretty-much-Greek-to-me-ly y'rs  - patrick