I can elaborate on that a bit.

Consider control structures such as for loops. In Fortran, they put the "for" after the statement to indicate vector hardware usage. Perl has the same syntax! But, it works the same as the ordinary form. But, in general the idea is to define looping constructs that are more like SIMD rather than traditional loops. That is, perform this step on each of all these items, but in no particular order. Order of the iterations is not defined, and may just as well be parallel or code for the SIMD instructions on the CPU.

In particular, the "hyper" operator syntax is defined this way. @c = @a »+« @b; will add the corresponding elements in parallel. @list.».run(); will execute the method on every item in the list, in parallel.

Also, lists may be "lazy", and establish co-routines to delay evaluation. But, if there are more cores free, why not start working on the list AND return at the same time? Don't wait for items to be needed for sure, any more than always computing them up front. It can compute the list in the background.

—John

In reply to Re^2: Multi-core and the future by John M. Dlugosz
in thread Multi-core and the future by pileofrogs

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