Abstract

. A monad for concurrent programming that is suitable for being built into Haskell is presented. The monad consists of only four primitives with a very simple semantics. A number of examples demonstrate that monads encapsulating other, more sophisticated communication paradigms known from concurrent functional languages such as Concurrent ML, Facile, and Erlang can be naturally and systematically constructed from the built-in monad in a purely functional way. The paper argues that minimizing the number and complexity of the concurrency primitives and maximizing the use of purely functional abstractions in the design of concurrent languages helps to remedy a recurrent dilemma, namely, how to keep the language small and rigorously defined, yet to provide the programmer with all the communication constructs required. An interleaving implementation of the monad has been built by extending Mark Jones's Gofer environment to handle the concurrency primitives. All programs presented ...

Citations