asyncio: What is the difference between tasks, futures, and coroutines?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wednesday 06 May 2015 14:47, Rustom Mody wrote:

> It strikes me that the FP crowd has stretched the notion of function
> beyond recognition And the imperative/OO folks have distorted it beyond
> redemption.

In what way?


> And the middle road shown by Pascal has been overgrown with weeds for some
> 40 years...

As much as I like Pascal, and am pleased to see someone defending it, I'm 
afraid I have no idea what you mean by this.


> If the classic Pascal (or Fortran or Basic) sibling balanced abstractions
> of function-for-value procedure-for-effect were more in the collective
> consciousness rather than C's travesty of function, things might not have
> been so messy.

I'm not really sure that having distinct procedures, as opposed to functions 
that you just ignore their return result, makes *such* a big difference. Can 
you explain what is the difference between these?

sort(stuff)  # A procedure.
sort(stuff)  # ignore the function return result

And why the first is so much better than the second?



> Well... Dont feel right bashing C without some history...
> 
> C didn't start the mess of mixing procedure and function -- Lisp/Apl did.
> Nor the confusion of = for assignment; Fortran did that.

Pardon, but = has been used for "assignment" for centuries, long before 
George Boole and Ada Lovelace even started working on computer theory. Just 
ask mathematicians:

"let y = 23"

Is that not a form of assignment?




-- 
Steve