"Scott Woods" wrote
Symmetric interaction between groups of peer objects is a different model of operation. Any object can "call" any other object and there is no "return" (i.e. future). Most of my async-programming problems seem to fall into the latter category.
I'm certainly no expert in threads, but I'm fascinated by the idea of 'symmetric interaction'. Do you have a short example of symmetric interaction ***Only*** ?( without any other structure to the system). I ask because it sounds
----- Original Message ----- From: "Andy Little" <andy@servocomm.freeserve.co.uk> To: <boost@lists.boost.org> Sent: Wednesday, November 02, 2005 10:14 PM Subject: Re: [boost] Active objects? like a
recipe for chaos.
Ha. Reading my message after your feedback, it does. Surely in any practical system, there must be a
higher level of organisation than this?
I used the word symmetric to try and distinguish the nature of objects in the world of D. Schmidt, from those of H. Sutter. It refers to the equivalent potentials that each object has to send messages (to HS; call a queuable method) to another object. There is an asymmetry on the HS model where calls are made to an active object and information is returned through the future concept. In a world such as that of DS (also refer to SDL) all exchange of information is through the same mechanism. Of course, they do not send the same messages (was this your concern? :-). The "higher level of organisation" that you expect would manifest itself in the different messages being sent, e.g. CHALLENGE, WELCOME and the different roles that each object has in an exchange.