Re: Are rendezvous dead?

[john.mccabe@emrad.ns.com (John McCabe)]

On 14 Apr 2002 12:52:51 -0700, dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) wrote:

>But generally from a design and structure point of view,
>RV is far superior, for the same reason that CSP is superior to
>semaphores (I trust no one will dispute the
>latter, though you never know on CLA)

Funny you should mention that, but... only kidding :-)

I just thought it might be worth mentioning Occam here which, for
inter-process communication and synchronisation used 'channels', the
semantics of which are similar to the Ada rendezvous. The designers of
Occam used the concepts of CSP very heavily, as it was clearly the
most relevant paradigm(?) at the time. Personally, I haven't seen
anything that would change that.

As far as rendezvous vs protected objects are concerned, the point of
the protected object appears to be to provide a mechanism for shared,
mutually exclusive access to resources. While a rendezvous can be used
to provide a similar mechanism (and, I believe, was often used in
'passive tasks' to emulate such a mechanism), the rendezvous' forte is
direct task to task communication.

Of course I may be wrong.. :-)