Re: Concurrency in Gnat 3.05?

[stt@henning.camb.inmet.com (Tucker Taft)]

Spasmo (cosc19z5@Bayou.UH.EDU) wrote:

: Robert Dewar (dewar@cs.nyu.edu) wrote:
: ...
: :   Of course it is not truly concurrent, there is no such thing as true
: :   concurrency on a monoprocessor! 

In the Ada 95 reference manual (RM95 9.0(11)), we adopted the term 
"concurrency" to mean (software) multitasking, and "parallelism" to 
mean (hardware) multiprocessing.  I doubt if there is any official 
distinction between these two, but I have read a number of books that 
adopt this convention, or something close to it.  However, when one 
says "true concurrency" I will admit the distinction is probably lost.

In any case, as was pointed out, the most obvious problem is probably the
lack of overlapping of DOS I/O with task execution, which is almost certainly
inherent in the implementation of DOS.  One could implement periodic
polling, perhaps, to accomplish the goal for terminal input, but I presume 
there are limits to the energy willing to be devoted to DOS-based tasking.

: Spasmo

-Tucker Taft   stt@inmet.com   http://www.inmet.com/~stt/
Intermetrics, Inc.  Cambridge, MA  USA