Possible language changes

[Doug Lea]

> (See http://www.openmp.org/drupal/mp-documents/cspec20.pdf )
> 

> We could still ignore it.  On the other hand, it's a widely used
> system, which seems to be supported by most vendor compiler, which
> has an open source implementation, and which seems to share the
> problems we're addressing.

I don't want to argue this point, but it seems to me that
defining a Thread class (or something similar) would not in the least
bit HURT OpenMP; they would use it at most only under the covers rather
than explicitly incorporating it.

> 
> What's the problem we're trying to address here?  

The ability to write a concurrent program and be confident that it
will run on any C++ platform? Again, I'm  not the right
person to try to guage exactly what that should entail.


> Is it purely a
> specification issue in that it seems strange to talk about
> threads without having a defined way of introducing them?
> If so, does it make more sense to cast this as defining something
> like a "futures" library package, which gives you access to
> concurrency, but doesn't really claim to be anyone's basic threads
> library?

That would be OK by me too. The people who care most about what
Thread-like APIs look like should make this call -- My understanding
is that this is the main reason why Doug S., Kevlin, Ben, and Peter are
even on this list. What do you guys think?

-Doug