The real order is this one...
48 karma · joined December 2, 2011
Oh, wait... this is Hacker News.
"Geek Central".
Whilst the 'staircase' form forces each message to await the return from the reciever. The 'cascade' form could be used to post commands to a concurrent process into a separate recieving processor's message queue with no need to await a reply - as in Eiffel's Command/Query Separation Principle.
Also, 'futures' could be used to decouple queries from having to await replies from the reciever's of their messages. All that is needed is for variables defined through assignment to a query to remain potentially undefined until needed by some command. At this point all of the command's arguments would need to be defined and it would either have to await a reply from the queried process, or await some globally visible but yet to be defined thread to bind a value to the variable i.e. dataflow.
All of this hinges on using a language that doesn't freak out when processing undefined variables, but regards them as their symbolic names, reducing complex expressions with a collection of rewrite rules.
I'd be interested to know what you think about my proposal for these richer concurrent semantics.
-- Uncompetative