producer-consumer using assignment

Question

I am interested in finding if producer-consumer problem when there are multiple produce and multiple consumer be solved without using assignment i.e., using functional style of programming? How?

Producer-consumer problem

Thanks

Answer 1

Yes, you can do it quite nicely with message passing in Concurrent ML. Don't be put off by the age of the system; John Reppy's book and papers are excellent guides to the topic. Beautiful stuff!

Answer 2

Having multiple threads necessarily requires impure (non-functional) actions. Pure functional programming considers your application to be the evaluation of a function. The concept of concurrently evaluating two things and passing data between them is not meaningful within this framework.

Although one can evaluate multiple parts of a function in parallel, as in Haskell's ``par operator, this is not the same as the producer-consumer problem, and as such I don't think you'll be able to solve it in a functional way.