Whither Tango?

[Justin Johansson]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> retro and iota rock.

This discussion has been a lot of fun and certainly there is no need
for anyone to feel agitated (referring to rising temperature earlier
on in this discussion).  My life does not depend on whether or not
retro is in or out and nor does the choice of any particular word
prevent me from getting work done.

While I disagree that retro == reverse order, I'm happy to admit that
as far as words sound retro is kind of "cute".  Earlier though I argued
that retro in the context of its proposed use is, to me , more about
going back to a prior epoch on time which is distinct from doing
things in reverse order.

Given it's high "cuticity index" (to coin a term) it would be a
pity, if some future version of D supporting Software Transactional
Memory (STM)*** could not make use of retro as it was already taken
for much lesser deserving purposes.

*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memory

<sidebar>
Snippet from that link:

In 2005, Tim Harris, Simon Marlow, Simon Peyton Jones, and Maurice 
Herlihy described an STM system built on Concurrent Haskell that enables 
arbitrary atomic operations to be composed into larger atomic 
operations, a useful concept impossible with lock-based programming.
</sidebar>

Now I know that is a tenuous argument to reserve a word for some
pie-in-the-sky future language feature but imagine how cool this
sounds:

Dec 2012. News flash.

Digital Mars is pleased to announce release 3 of the D programming
language featuring Software Transactional Memory ...
... the retro() function makes all changes to the transacted
memory region rollback to the state of the memory that existed
prior to the beginning of the transaction.

Now something like that would really rock!

Heh, all of this is probably a useless ramble and can see myself
getting way out of depth real soon.

With kind regards to all,

Justin