15-312 Foundations of Programming Languages
Lecture 21: Futures
In this lecture we first discuss the semantics of lazy evaluation.
This is a particular implementation strategy for call-by-name
function application where the first time the argument is actually
needed, its value is cached.
Lazy evaluation is related to the idea of futures which comes from
the Multilisp language. Futures constitute a form of explicit
parallelism where an expression future(e) spawns
the computation of e as a separate thread, but returns
immediately with a handle on the value yet to be computed. That
handle can be passed around, but if its structure is ever explicitly
required we block, waiting for the thread that computes the future
to terminate. We sketch a semantics and show some example programs
using futures.
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fp@cs
Frank Pfenning
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