Re: Functional design for a basic simulation pipe.

[Zheng Li <li@pps.jussieu.fr>]

Hi,

Hugo Ferreira <hmf@inescporto.pt> writes:
> Hmmm... these combinators seem to be well understood. Know of any
> description (article, blog, etc) of these in a functional programming
> setting?
These combinators pervasively exist in functional languages and other
declarative style languages. There's no authoritative definition though,
they vary from language to language, with some slight differences.

> I see that recursion as shown above could be useful: one of the
> outputs would simply be an input to another stream generator.
Yes. This _could_ be directly simulated with OCaml's recursive values if not
for the restriction I mentioned before. 

> I (think) I see what you mean. Things seem to be coming together. What
> you are saying is that I could use this "delay" so that only when the
> value is available would it be "passed back" to the "stream generator"
> thereby providing the "feedback" I need. In fact this "delay" is more
> general and could be used to define various types of flows. Nice!
The "delay" like facilities are usually provided as language primitives in
dataflow languages, not in the library space. I can't figure out how to
simulate it through plain OCaml and still keeping a combinatorial interface at
the same time. I can image some workarounds to relax the restriction: recursive
function, reference, variants, but all of them come with some syntactic burdens
and can hardly used as combinators directly. On the other hand, there is still
some possibility of making camlp4 extension to do that. I just haven't got
chance to do any investigation on that.

Btw, I just cleaned up some old code and will release it right now. I'm not
sure whether it can help directly in your case, but I hope so.

Regards
-- 
Zheng Li
http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~li