[Python-3000] Futures in Python 3000

[Andy Sy]

Guido van Rossum wrote:

> Let me just add that Andy is wasting his time. Python 3000 won't have
> continuations.

Huh?  Futures are very different from continuations.  I still have a
hard time understanding continuations (and am no fan of them), but
futures seem to be a rather simple abstraction to comprehend.

It just seems like clean syntax to do general asynchronous stuff.
The links I posted earlier:

http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/alice/manual/futures.html
http://kasparov.skife.org/blog-live/src/futures.writeback
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/Future.html

discuss the abstraction in greater depth.

Note that I'm not even lobbying to see futures in Py3K, just that
maybe checking them out may inspire some ideas regarding related
mechanisms in Python.  It's just something I came across that I
thought might be of interest.