-----Original Message----- From: boost-bounces@lists.boost.org [mailto:boost-bounces@lists.boost.org]On Behalf Of Douglas Gregor Sent: Friday, February 13, 2004 5:37 PM To: Boost mailing list Subject: Re: [boost] Future of threads (III)
This reminds me of the actor model of distributed computation. If you are familiar with actors, could you briefly compare/contrast your approach against them?
i know of uml's actor but not sure if that's the same thing. and my knowledge of uml is so lame i suspect i shouldnt attempt any analogies.
I was not referring to UML actors, but to a model for (distributed) computation.
was there some specific aspect of alt-threads that needed elaboration (yeah, like everything :-) or were you suggesting a new direction for me to check out?
Well, you might be interested in this:
http://www.cs.rpi.edu/courses/spring03/dci/actor-semantics.pdf
Erm, wow! A little too much "convex, must and may collapsing in the presence of fairness" for my palate :-) I soldiered on "in the presence of send" (refer to a previous mail) to the point where I could vaguely imagine an MPL implementation of their actor language. But that is where my capabilities hit a flat-spot. I can appreciate the desire to found "actors" in a theory. There is also (probably) a healthy proportion of "experts" around RDBMS's that know little about set theory. I will (rather blindly ;-) assume that one day all "inherited thread-type" systems will be validated using some form of actor algebra. Agree with everything said about platform-independence. Cheers, Scott