[clean-list] Simplified uniqueness typing

[zuurb078 at planet.nl]

Hi Jari-Matti,
 
Rinus Plasmeijer told me a while ago that they first want to test/reason extensively whether there are any programs accepted by the existing uniqueness type checker but not by the new one. Also, the new system requires somewhat different uniqueness annotations, so there would be a need to have existing clean software automatically converted. Neither are easy tasks.
 
Clean already has modest ways to split off many unique objects off of one 'mother' object and at the end recombine them: You can open many unique files based on one unique file system. This is easily implemented because there is only one filesystem: whenever you close a unique file, you can be sure that it is closed into the right filesystem.
 
But this is not a general feature that you could for instance apply to a unique array. A difficulty is that when 'closing' a part of the unique array split off earlier, you should close it into the same mother-array. There is no static test the compiler can apply to ensure this. Also, in case of an array, when you split off unique sub-arrays, they should be non overlapping. The compiler cannot test this in general.
 
I expect that for parallel processing there will be a number of special purpose constructs like opening and closing files. I know of no research in this direction.
 
Regards Erik Zuurbier

________________________________

Van: clean-list-bounces at science.ru.nl namens Jari-Matti Mäkelä
Verzonden: do 20-11-2008 12:12
Aan: clean-list at science.ru.nl
Onderwerp: [clean-list] Simplified uniqueness typing



Hi

are there any plans to adopt the simplified uniqueness typing system
(http://www.cs.tcd.ie/~devriese/pub/ifl07-paper.pdf) in the coming versions of
Clean?

Another question - if Clean continues to support parallel/concurrent
programming some day, does uniqueness typing support dividing a massive
computational task to several threads and then combining the results or does
it disallow this. Are there alternative approaches to this problem?

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