Xavier Leroy showed me how to set things up so that an OCaml computation is interrupted after a pre-set time limit to ask the user how long to continue. Now I’d like to do the same thing for two parallel computations that I’d like to have share the time available more-or-less evenly. (I’m writing OCaml code for automatically proving results in the HOL Light theorem prover, and I have a situation where the code needs to prove that a value is positive or prove that it’s negative, but the code doesn’t know which, if either, it will be able to prove.) Can this be done? If so, then what’s the easiest way to do it? As a special case of this question, for an expression of the form “let x,y = f(args1),g(args2)”, how does the system allocate time between the computation of x and y? (If it’s more-or-less equally, then that solves my problem; if one of x or y is computed first, then the other, then I’ve still got a problem.)

Steve Brackin