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From: "Jon Harrop" <jon@ffconsultancy.com>
To: "'Hugo Ferreira'" <hmf@inescporto.pt>
Cc: <caml-list@inria.fr>
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Subject: RE: [Caml-list] Efficient OCaml multicore -- roadmap?

Hugo wrote:
> Fabrice wrote:
> > You think the programmers in the world that are only interested in
> > floating-point intensive computations, with fine-grain concurrency,
> > are a huge majority. I think they are not so many. Can we do a better
> > job of quantifying this ?
>
> Some of us are interested in parallel computation for symbolic
manipulation. In
> my case I am manipulating sets of literals in predicate logic. I am sure
this is also
> useful in other areas such ans ILP, graph mining, frequent pattern mining,
etc.

Yes. Symbolic programming is increasingly common in scientific computing as
scientists have come to realise that higher-level languages make it feasible
to attack problems that were considered intractable before. Thomas
Fischbacher did some good work on this using OCaml a few years ago that
attracted a lot of attention.

Cheers,
Jon.