Previous sections illustrate how Orc can use the fork-join idiom to process a fixed set of expressions or a list of values. Suppose that instead we wish to process all the publications of an expression F, and once this processing is complete, execute some expression G. For example, F publishes the contents of a text file, one line at a time, and we wish to print each line to the console using the site println, then publish a signal after all lines have been printed.

Sequential composition alone is not sufficient, because we have no way to detect when all of the lines have been processed. A recursive fork-join solution would require that the lines be stored in a traversable data structure like a list, rather than streamed as publications from F. A better solution uses the ; combinator to detect when processing is complete:

F >x> println(x) >> stop ; signal

Since ; only evaluates its right side if the left side does not publish, we suppress the publications on the left side using stop. Here, we assume that we can detect when F halts. If, for example, F is publishing the lines of the file as it receives them over a socket, and the sending party never closes the socket, then F never halts and no signal is published.