Merb's radical (but very cool) new caching mechanism

This is maybe a pretty half-baked idea, but could a language that supports partial evaluation replace a pretty significant chunk of most web app caching systems?<p>I guess the tricky part is that side effects (e.g. another process modifying the database) are pretty much unavoidable with current architecture.

Why is this considered "radical"?

Except for it's architecture, which seems slightly more pluggable than the ASP.NET's, this seems pretty much exactly the same as the ASP.NET's caching layer. Not to mention ASP.NET supports automaticly invalidating cache-dependencies.<p>Making this pluggable to support both ASP.NET and memcached, would be a simple matter of writing a wrapper class and defining a simple interface. Should be done in about 30 minutes with minimal loss in features.<p>This has been around since at least 2002. So I'd hardly say there is anything <i>radical</i> about this.