archives

"Prep" in programming languages

"Prep" is a neglected topic in programming languages. Consider the following example of unbounded nondeterminism:

CreateUnbounded.[ ]:Integer ≡
  Let aCounter ←  SimpleCounter.[ ]。    // let aCounter be a new Counter
    Prep □aCounter.go[ ]。  // send aCounter a go message and concurrently
      □aCounter.stop[ ]▮ // return the result of sending aCounter a stop message

CreateUnbounded.[ ] is an unbounded integer.

As a notational convenience, when an Actor receives message then it can send an arbitrary message to itself by prefixing it with “..” as in the following example:

Actor SimpleCounter[ ]
   count ≔ 0,   // the variable count is initially 0
   continue ≔ Trueimplements Counter using
    stop[ ] → 
      count  // return count
        afterward continue ≔ False¶ // continue is updated to False for the next message received
    go[ ] →  
      continue �                                                                   
        TruePrep count ≔ count+1⚫。    // increment count                                     
                hole ..go[ ] ⍌  // In a hole of the cheese, send go[ ] to this counter
        FalseVoid▮  // if continue is False, return Void

Interface Counter with
     stop[ ] ↦ Integer,
     go[] ↦ Void

Moderation on LtU

I thought more about the issue of moderation of LtU. I think a reasonable compromise would be to let me moderate the topics I created myself -- this means mostly removing posts I find insulting or otherwise unfit for a polite, constructive discussion. This is both less work than trying to moderate a whole website, less opportunities for making bad choices (those that strongly dislike moderation can think of it as restricted damage), and it makes a kind of sense (if you think of LtU as a distributed blog, as it purported to be at the beginning, letting authors moderate their own blog posts is something reasonable).

Would the LtU community agree with this compromise?
(If so, I can try to find what are the technical buttons that need to be pushed to provide a Drupal-98 moderation interface.)