In [[computer science]], a '''promise''' (also known as a '''future''' in some languages) is a placeholderproxy for a result that is not yet known, usually because athe computation has not yet finished or a message from aof remoteits partyvalue has not yet arrivedcompleted. They were introduced in [[1977]] in the paper by Henry Baker and [[Carl Hewitt]]. The use of promises (futuures) can dramatically reduce latency in distributed systems because it enables pipelining of messages, called '''promise pipelining''' [http://www.erights.org/elib/distrib/pipeline.html] [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PromisePipelining].
