Mark --

Yes, I would say that is a very good place to look at and start.

One of the things that would help the merging of Smalltalk and Linda 
is to see what aspects of Smalltalk can be abstracted by the Linda 
tuple. There are two obvious ones.

* A tuple can be used as an abstraction for sending and receiving of 
a message, though in Linda it is a little more general and comes out 
as publish and subscribe.

* The second abstraction is to use the Linda tuple to model 
externalized properties of an object (you don't want to expose the 
instance directly since that ruins encapsulation, but it is quite 
reasonable to think of exposing the kind of values that getters 
expose to pattern recognition and retrieval).

* A third and more subtle one is that one could conceive of a tuple 
space that only has the exposed end of a stream as its single 
"tuple". Linda matching in such a space could be used to construct 
compilers and other kinds of translators, etc.

* A fourth usage would be to model a reasoning tool (like ART) that 
permits both forward and backwards processing. ART's forward 
reasoning was fast enough to allow e.g. views to be made of a model 
without touching the model in any way, just by being able to react 
(event driven style) to the new values (that were tuples in ART) 
being produced by the model process.

Cheers,

Alan

At 1:48 PM -0400 7/31/00, Mark Guzdial wrote:
>>Could you tell us a little more about full unification in CLOS?
>>
>
>After Bolot ported Mike Teng's Prolog/V to Squeak, but before 
>starting on these book projects, I started exploring using the 
>Prolog unification for LindaTalk, but I didn't get very far. 
>Perhaps that's a start using existing code?
>
>Mark
>
>--------------------------
>Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
>Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies.
>Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/
>(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
>http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html