[Python-3000] Futures in Python 3000

[Guido van Rossum]

On 4/20/06, Andy Sy <andy at neotitans.com> wrote:
> Guido van Rossum wrote:
>
> > Let me just add that Andy is wasting his time. Python 3000 won't have
> > continuations.
>
> Huh?  Futures are very different from continuations.  I still have a
> hard time understanding continuations (and am no fan of them), but
> futures seem to be a rather simple abstraction to comprehend.

Ok, sorry. I was confused by the mentioning of continuations in an
earlier response.

> It just seems like clean syntax to do general asynchronous stuff.

Right. So go right ahead and implement them using threads. Or,
actually, you don't have to do anything -- the Queue module already
implements something that's more powerful and just as easy to use.

If you want to contribute a pure Python module that implements some
useful form of futures, you don't have to wait for Python 3.0. But
before you contribute this to Python 2.6 (it's too late for 2.5), you
should probably have released it successfully as a separate 3rd party
(open source) module for a while, and have many happy users. That's
the standard for library contributions these days.

--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)