[Swift-devel] Scala

[Ian Foster]

Hi Ben:

I gather you are in Australia at present? Say hello from me.

I think that the key feature of Swift (apart from functional semantics  
and XDTM-like mechanisms) is its use of single assignment variables  
for synchronization.

I'm not sure that one has to have everything-parallel semantics to do  
what we want. One could also have explicitly parallel operators, like  
"forall" and "par" used in CC++.

I remain interested in the question of whether we can reduce barriers  
to use of Swift, and its long-term maintenance costs, by adopting some  
existing technology to build on. Scala is one of several potential  
candidates.

Ian.

On Oct 24, 2009, at 12:23 AM, Ben Clifford wrote:

>
> On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Ian Foster wrote:
>
>> Could Scala be what we have been looking for?
>>
>> http://www.scala-lang.org/
>
> The thing that seems hard to get from any language, and thus drives
> swiftscript to be its own language, is the everything-parallel  
> execution
> of expressions. Nothing that I've seen in scala (which admittedly I
> haven't thought about much) seems revolutionary in that respect.
>
> --