[TriLUG] Perl and SMP

[Michael Tharp]

Andrew Perrin wrote:
> Well, definitely *not* being a computer science type, I could imagine a 
> "smart" interpreter that would open as many threads as there were 
> processors, then assign particular tasks to each process and return them 
> to the main, thereby making the threading transparent to the user/process. 
> I assume this has been thought of and either implemented or rejected for a 
> good reason, but that's what I was thinking about.
>
>   
Languages that automatically parallelize loops are of the functional
variety, not the procedural. Perl is a procedural language. Being that
I've never touched a functional language in my life, and don't plan to
anytime soon, I can't name a particular one that does this, but I
imagine someone here will be more than willing to detail the exploits of
such a language.