[E-Lang] Progress & Non-Progress Report

[Dean Tribble]

>Dean, how does Joule provide hashtables without "=="?

In E, near structures (and hashtables in particular) must support 
synchronous access.  In Joule, (almost) nothing is synchronous, including 
near structures.  Thus, the issue you are wrestling with essentially 
doesn't arise (because a normal computation can accommodate receiving a 
"promise" for a request from a hashtable).  Thus, I can perfectly well have 
a hashtable sent from Alice with "near" keys, and have Bob receive them 
with "eventual" keys.  When someone retrieves from the table, the 
comparison with the "eventual" key just proceeds when the resolution 
eventually propagates to Bob.  If the key is matched against something that 
is already available on Bob, the answer is bound immediately (the channel 
is forwarded, and queued messages to the result of the fetch are delivered).

Does that answer the question you were asking?  :-)

dean