"Brian Hurt" <bh...@spnz.org> wrote in message

> n...@cus.cam.ac.uk (Nick Maclaren) writes:

>>That experience debunked the claims of the
>>functional programming brigade that such methodology gave automatic
>>parallelisation.

> Automatic parallelization, no.  You're looking for a silver bullet that
> probably doesn't exist.  On the other hand, functional programming makes
> writting parallel code much easier to do.

> The biggest problem with parallelized code is the race condition- which
> arise from mutable data.  Every peice of mutable data is a race condition
> waiting to happen.  Mutable data needs to be kept to an absolute minimum,
> and then handled in such a way that it's correct in the presence of
> threads.

> I've come to the conclusion that functional programming is necessary-
> just not sufficient.

> There are two languages I know of in which it may
> be possible to write non-trivial parallel programs correctly and
> maintainably- concurrent haskell with STM and erlang- and both are, at
> their core, purely functional languages.