Announcement: Stackless Python At It's Best, Ever.

18-May-02: Limbo Dancing works fine! Yet some more thinking for weeks, and a few days of implementation. Now, the first implementation of channels is available. It isn't complete, but works just fine. The stackless module now supports to create channels by function channel(). A channel has the methods send() and receive(). Try it yourself! You might either want to build your own Stackless, checking out the module stackless from :pserver:anonymous@tismer.com:/home/cvs , or, for Windows users, just take the pre-built binary, extract it into some directory, and start Python or PythonWin fom there. I will for sure build an installer again, after I have got some feedback.

This implementation tries to follow the concepts of the OCCAM/ALEF/LIMBO languages by supporting the channel concept as the central communication/blocking/control feature. Tasks do not communicate directly, but through channels.

You might have guessed it: Stackless will try to implement/support Hoare's CSP, finally. But before, I have to understand more of it. This will happen in the next few weeks.

This release is an alpha release. There are most probably a lot of omissions. Some are obvious:

- There isn't yet a scheduler, like there was one for the uthread module. This is trivial to implement and will be added in almost no time.

- There isn't yet an ALT/PRI ALT construct like in OCCAM/ALEF/LIMBO. This is most sophisticated and very hard to implement correctly! I will try to find out how to do this the best way, during my stay at IronPort, from May 18th to May 29. If somebody from the US would like to contact me by phone, please use the opportunity and call me via IronPort. I am employed by this company.

- You shouldn't use channels from the interpreter prompt, but in scripts, only. The machinery doesn't check for changed interactive sessions yet and will most likely crash, soon. Despite of that, it seems to work nicely with PythonWin and extensions.