[erlisp-devel] some thoughts ...

[Dirk Gerrits]

Hi,

Aurélien Campéas wrote:
> a) I have quickly skimmed over the current source 

Cool.  So what do you think?  Anything you would have done differently?

> and it seems that the important functionality of process linking is 
> missing, isn't it ?

It is.  I've done some thinking on it, but no coding yet.  I first had
(have?) to improve my knowledge of the Common Lisp Condition System [0],
which is a whole other cup of tea than Erlang's. ;)

By the way, linking is not the only bit of important functionality
that's missing.  Development is still at a very early stage, due to my
busy school schedule over the past year.  Hopefully this will be better
during/after the coming summer.  Also, it appears there will now be a
Google-funded student working on Erlisp during the summer. [1]

> b) I've also just read your "mop" section of the roadmap (section 2),
> where you want to investigate other avenues for parallelism than
> Erlang's one.
> 
> I suggest reading what's made available by Mozart/Oz should give you
> most-important ideas about that. Erlang's concurrency is only one
> possibility in Oz, actually one of the more complex and powerful, but
> there is a whole scale of ways to go concurrent worth studying there.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I've already been pointed to Oz in the
past.  I have the Oz book, and it has been in the Erlisp references
section for some time.  So far I haven't had the time to read it all,
but I've already been convinced that Oz and its concurrency aspects are
worthy objects of study.

> FYI, the Oz book is available there : 
> http://www.ulb.ac.be/di/rwuyts/INFO020_2003/vanRoyHaridi2003-book.pdf

This is a draft right?  My hardcover is from 2004.  Still, a digital
(searchable!) version is very handy.  Thanks for the link!

> It seems to me that wrt Oz, the parallel with the MOP is only
> superficial. On the other hand, I know one thing called
> "Agent-Group-Role" developped at lirmm which really looks like a mop for
> multi-agent systems (whatever that means, in fact agent there has to be
> seen as concurrent objects). You can have a first look at this :
> http://www.ualr.edu/kxaydin/Agents/From%20Agents%20to%
> 20Organizations.pdf

Maybe it is my lack of knowledge on multi-agent systems, but I don't
really see the MOP relation here.

The CLOS MOP allows you to change the object system with which you build
object oriented systems.

The way I see it, AGR allows you to build multi-agent systems, but not
change the way by which you do so.  But again, I could be wrong; I'm the
newbie here. ;)

Oh but anyway, thanks for the link!

> I really had no time to allot to seriously playing with it but I intent
> to someday ... :)

Are we still talking about AGR, or about Erlisp again?  Either way, feel
free to seriously play with either as much as you like, and let us know
of your new-found insights. ;)

Kind regards,

Dirk Gerrits

[0] http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.html
[1] http://dirkgerrits.com/2005/06/26/9-lispnyc-summer-of-code-projects/