From: gabriele renzi <surrender_it@...1.vip.ukl.yahoo.com>
Date: 2004-07-13T03:27:25+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby interpreter as mach kernel server (beside bsd)

il Mon, 12 Jul 2004 12:12:04 GMT, Martin DeMello
<martindemello@yahoo.com> ha scritto::

>Robert Klemme <bob.news@gmx.net> wrote:
> 
>> If String#length is a synchronus call (like it is today), you just invoke it
>> and have the answer and can work with it.
>> 
>> If it's asynchronous (as in message oriented systems) you have to place your
>> request in some inbound queue and make sure, you get another event if the
>> result is there.  Now if the result is sent back with another message you
>> have to react on it and proceed with whatever calculation you were doing and
>> that needed the length of the String.
>> 
>> Now, what's more complicated?
>
>This might mesh well with Oz's dataflow concurrency, where the thread
>would essentially suspend itself until the value was available.

I think this maps quite good to the actor model in Io
(www.iolanguage.com).
In Io you call a method like:

obj methodname(args)

and if you call it like:
obj @methodname(args)

it returns you a Future object.
You then test the future object and in case you retriev the value:
future_object isReady
future_object value print

Otherwise you can avoid to handle the future object like this:
obj @@methodname(args) #returns nil

It is an interesting model, and imho seem very OO, simple and
powerful. 

Now if I just was good enough to implement Object#async_send() ... ;)

PS
I may be wrong about the syntax, not really an Io programmer