Re: Tasks in Gnat3.05 for Dos?

[jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony)]

In article <Duz0vv.L67@world.std.com> bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff) writes:

> John Harbaugh  <johnh@bunsen.ds.boeing.com> wrote:

> > In their excellent book "Concurrency In Ada" Burns and Welling make
> > a useful distinction between parallelism and concurrency:
> >
> > "Two processes are said to be executing in parallel if at any
> > instant they are both executing...  By comparison, two processes are
> > said to be concurrent if they have the potential for executing in
> > parallel." 
> 
> Can you write a test program that can tell the difference?

This is an interesting distinction, but as Bob points out it is
problematic.  The problem concerns the term "potential".  We can
certainly infer that parallel processes are concurrent processes, but
it is not obvious what the other concurrent processes are.

I'm in the process of getting this book, so I don't know at this point
whether the authors spell out what constitutes "potential" in this
context.

/Jon
-- 
Jon Anthony
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