With the advent of multi-core processors concurrent programming is becoming indispensable. Scala's primary concurrency construct is actors. Actors are basically concurrent processes that communicate by exchanging messages. Actors can also be seen as a form of active objects where invoking a method corresponds to sending a message. The Scala Actors library provides both asynchronous and synchronous message sends (the latter are implemented by exchanging several asynchronous messages). Moreover, actors may communicate using futures where requests are handled asynchronously, but return a representation (the future) that allows to await the reply. This tutorial is mainly designed as a walk-through of several complete example programs Our first example consists of two actors that exchange a bunch of messages and then terminate. The first actor sends "ping" messages to the second actor, which in turn sends "pong" messages back (for each received "ping" message one "pong" message).
emir burak In Informatics, there are two (related) meanings of the word "monad": * A triple (T,eta,mu) following some laws in category theory * A way of structuring functional programs The first meaning can probably not be described easily in natural language. Michael Arbib and Ernest Manes' "Arrows, Structure, Functors - The Categorical Imperative". describe them as (generalized monoids) in Section 10.2 and through adjointness to the forgetful functor from algebras to sets. That last connection basically makes everything that we can write down or model using abstract syntax / universal algebra a monad. The second view is described in Wadler's papers. I mention category theory because we can describe things that are not computations as monads. It also reminds us why a monad is a collection of things taken together. With the List example in mind, a potentially more revealing account on monads (aka triples) can be found in the free book Barr, Wells