Yes but I'd argue that your original intuition was probably correct - we don't have this distinction in core.async because we have channels and they can be used

Yes but I'd argue that your original intuition was probably correct - we don't have this distinction in core.async because we have channels and they can be used for both one offs and stream processing. Of course the reason to eliminate the distinction would be to simplify sugar over asynchronous code a la F#, C#, Scala and now core.async. mraleph seemed to suggest this is being considered for Dart.