Re: Multitasking and containers

[Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@arcor.de>]

On Mon, 2006-11-27 at 04:17 +0000, Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:
> Matthew Heaney wrote:
> > "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:
> > 
> >> Write your own container. Parallel systems require delicate handmade work.
> > 
> > Horrible advice.  Just declare the container inside a protect object, and
> > manipulate the container by calling protected procedures.  Works great...
> 
> Not at all, [...]. Specific projects may, and 
> sometimes will, have requirements that are not met by such libraries.

But "parallel systems require delicate handmade work" is probably
not good advice at all, because (a) parallel systems operate in parallel
and there isn't a sharing issue in the first place, no protection is
needed. (b) When systems start communicating, and if it were true
that concurrency requires delicate handmade work, why then use a
language like Ada? The delicacies of the mechanisms behind tasks
and shared protected objects are hidden in Ada RTSs. Therefore, if
parallel systems do require delicate handmade work, the language
designers should abandon Ada tasks and protected objects, because
obviously they cannot meet the requirements of parallel systems.