Erlang (was Re: Good introduction to functional programming with Python?)

[Brad Knotwell]

"Alex Martelli" <aleaxit at yahoo.com> writes:
> It sure looks unique to me for its emphasis on concurrency (if there
> are other FP's that are similarly concurrency-oriented, I have not seen
> them yet).  But Scheme (albeit impure) and Erlang (albeit 'culturally
> not highly HOF-prone') together surely make up for a substantial share
> of functional-programming use, and just as surely form a solid case for
> static-typing NOT being central to FP (just as, say, Smalltalk and
> Python together form a solid case for static-typing not being central
> to OO, no matter how much Eiffel'ers may rant otherwise:-).

John Reppy's concurrent extensions to SML/NJ (CML) are delivered as part of 
the standard distribution.  Furthermore, his book "Concurrent Programming in 
ML" covers these extensions in detail.  What I don't know is 

FWIW, I believe the Glasgow Haskell compiler has concurrent extensions as well,
but I've no idea if they're delivered with the runtime environment or not.

Interestingly enough, finishing Reppy's book caused me to redesign a 
sequential Python program into a bunch of threads.  Overall, the design
became much clearer, but time will tell if it's as robust as the previous
program.

> Alex

I'm now wondering if Stackless Python's uthreads are cooperatively or
pre-emptively multi-tasked.

--Brad