Pict, a language based on Pi-Calculus

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

On Thu, Jul 15, 1999 at 12:34:38PM -0400, Paul Dufresne wrote:
> Hey, I am not sure but I think Tunes is unaware of the Pict programming
> language.
I am not unaware. But the Pi-calculus is a bad idea.
The Join-calculus does Right Thing(TM)
(and its implementation JOCAML is fully integrated into OCAML, too).
Discussion of why one is the Right Thing and the other is wrong
is a bit complicated for me to explain today (deadline pressure).
See technical papers about the topic of process calculi.
JOCAML is at http://para.inria.fr/
Made by the top of french research in the field.
(if only I could convince them to go reflective!)

Besides, the Join-calculus is "but" a reconstruction from a formal path
of the good old Actor model known to LISP hackers for twenty years --
Once again, LISP people are twenty years ahead
in terms of implementing the Right Thing(TM),
other CS people reinvent the thing formally twenty years after,
and the industry will have it deployed in another 20 years.
What a wonderful world we live in!

> I heard of this on the Concurrent-Clean mailing-list (a thread basically
> saying that Concurrent-Clean is not concurrent in the same sense that
> Pict is).
IIRC, Concurrent Clean is a concurrent implementation of a pure language.
Processes calculi, by definition, are impure, based on communication.

[ "Faré" | VN: Уng-Vû Bân | Join the TUNES project!   http://www.tunes.org/  ]
[ FR: François-René Rideau | TUNES is a Useful, Nevertheless Expedient System ]
[ Reflection&Cybernethics  | Project for  a Free Reflective  Computing System ]
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