[Swift-devel] Re: How to wait on functions that return no data?

[Ben Clifford]

On Tue, 25 Mar 2008, Michael Wilde wrote:

> From a pure language point of view, we should permit the return of data that
> can be grouped (batched) into files files in arbitrary chunks, determined and
> optimized by the implementation. Map-reduce tuples seem to work well for this
> model, and it seems that Swift could encompass it with minimal semantic change
> to the current language.

For your example, what way do you want to store the data on the remote 
side - I'm assuming not individual files.

The present dataset model should fairly easily accomodate the description 
of places to store data that aren't files - there's an abstraction in the 
implementation to help with that at the moment (DSHandle, which is what 
deals with the difference between in-memory values and on-disk files; and 
could fairly straightforwardly deal with other storage forms).

One of the project ideas I put in for the google summer of code was to 
play around with this, in fact.

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