Coroutines

["Robert W. Kerns" <RWK@scrc-yukon.arpa>]

    Date: Thu, 29 Oct 87 10:28 EST
    From: Daniel L. Weinreb <DLW@ALDERAAN.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>

    You seem to have learned a very different meaning of "coroutine" than
    the one I learned.  Of course, "coroutine" is a notoriously difficult
    term to define.  However, there's no question in my mind that if the two
    things can execute concurrently, you're not talking about a coroutine.
Exactly.

    This concurrency only does you any good if (a) you have real
    multiprocessing hardware, or (b) the processes sometimes wait for
    conditions other than each other.  
Or (c) the source and/or sink are black boxes already packaged as
separate processes.  Which is why Unix uses pipes, where nearly
always coroutines would be otherwise more apropriate.

(b) and (c) are the only ones which apply in our environment,
but I haven't been able to think of a reasonably simple non-silly
example to document their usefulness.