beginners elisp question - parallel execution

[simon254]

Hi,

sorry if this is a very dumb question:

in the past there were discussions about multi threading in emacs. My 
impression is that where most of a performance gain like this would be useful 
is for e.g. computing fuzzy scores for a long list of candidates or similar 
things. 

Would it be possible to introduce something like pure functions in fortran too 
elisp? I.e. functions that are not allowed to have side effects and for example 
act only on one list element? This could then be given to a new "number 
crunching" routine (mapcar_para?) which applies them in parallel to a list (via 
openmp or whatever)? Or is the concept already flawed? 

Again, sorry if this is dumb,

Simon