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From: Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>
Subject: Re: ADA client/server
Date: 2000/08/21
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In article <8nrrpd$aik1@news.cis.okstate.edu>,
  dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Aug 2000 14:25:15 GMT, Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>
wrote:
> >I often wonder what kind of drugs the folks at AT&T were on when they
> >thought up "fork" and "exec" as good ways to do multi-tasking. Some

> Can you elaborate? I'm not very familar with multitasking, but the
> little I've read about it puts heavy weight (fork) and light weight
> (thread) processes as complementary tools, each having its own use.

...spoken like someone who's never accidentally set off a fork-bomb on a
multiuser machine. :-)

Sure, fork and exec have their uses. They are essential in Unix for
creating processes (also termed "heavyweight threads" once lightweight
threads were introduced to Unixes much later). But that's only because
Unix was set up that way. Why not just have an OS call to create a
process (like is typically done with lightweight threads)? Its rarely
useful to have a program that can replicate copies of itself, and doing
it without errors is difficult (particularly when there are opened files
and such). It would take some real thought to come up with a method of
creating processes which is more mind-boggling and error-prone.

Of course the folks working on multi-threaded INTERCAL probably
succeeded with their multiple CAME FROM facility. But remember that
INTERCAL has had the worlds most twisted minds working on the problem
for years. :-)

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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