Re: RFC: C and concurrency (as CC extensions)

> well, one idea I encountered recently was CSP, which implementing as a 
> library feature was simple enough that I did this during part of one of
my 
> morning cl***** (diverting a little of my attention from the
lecture...).

You may want to investigate occam and the entire slew of languages that 
targetted the transputer.  occam embodied much of CSP and the transputer 
was an occam "engine". CSP/occam's alternates (ALT) is one thing that is 
not nicely done, IMHO, without direct syntax sup****t.  Defining 
structures or arrays to hold channels, and optional guards, at run-time 
is messy, occam's ALT is far easier to use.  occam also has TIMERs and 
the AFTER construct making timed ALT constructs simple to express and 
"replicated ALT" for handling multiple input channels.   Don't get me 
wrong. I'm addicted to C expression syntax and have been using it for 
well over 20 years but the occam CSP-inspired concurrency features were 
quite nice.

Transputer C compilers invariably had extensions to take advantage of 
the processor's features (channel I/O is directly implemented by the 
processor).  One, who's name escapes me, permitted channels as lvalues 
and rvalues allowing expressions such as "out = in1 + in2" to perform 
implicit channel I/O.   I think the explicit get/put operations are 
safer overall from a program comprehension PoV but the implicit form is 
kind of neat.