amb operators, sequential and parallel

leonoel / missionary

A functional effect and streaming system for Clojure/Script

Eclipse Public License 2.0

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amb operators, sequential and parallel #27

Closed leonoel closed 3 years ago

leonoel commented 3 years ago

Just syntactic sugar. Inside an ap block, amb? and amb= evaluate an arbitrary number of branches ambiguously, respectively sequentially or in parallel.

(defmacro amb? [& forms]
  `(case (m/?? (m/enumerate (range ~(count forms))))
     ~@(interleave (range) forms)))

(defmacro amb= [& forms]
  `(case (m/?= (m/enumerate (range ~(count forms))))
     ~@(interleave (range) forms)))

xificurC commented 3 years ago

amb? looks like a predicate, which confuses my brain. How about one of

?amb? and ?amb=. It keeps your current symbolic style but injects the word "amb"
?amb and =amb. It keeps the symbolic meaning of ? for sequential and = for concurrent forking but puts it at the beginning of the symbol.
a completely new symbol to mean amb, e.g. + that looks like the midpoint is splitting into multiple directions, turning into +? and +=.

leonoel commented 3 years ago

I would discard the third option because amb is an old and known idea, so hiding it behind a symbol is likely to add confusion for nothing. Please share your thoughts about naming in general in #29

leonoel commented 3 years ago

released b.19