From: Brian Milnes (brianmilnes_at_qwest.net)
Date: Wed Jan 14 2004 - 09:44:02 PST
Programming Semantics for Multi-Programmed Computations - Jack Dennis and
Earl Van Horn
The authors motivate multi-processing systems and then define
some concepts of MPS related to parallelism, naming and protection. They
authors seem to invent capabilities and a single hierarchical namespace for
objects in the system. They work out a careful process semantics with fork,
quit and join operations as well as a protected call system with exceptions.
They work through how this would be used to allow processes to cooperate
including how one process could be used to debug another process.
They also design a single name space for all system objects and
discuss how to resolve conflicts. This seems pretty advanced for the early
seventies and is reminiscent of modern programming languages hierarchical
name structure in packages such as Oracle or SML.
The weakness of this paper is the fact that it is pure theory
with no computer systems experimentation behind it. For example, I'm quite
suspicious that their having the parent process handle protection violations
will not work. Unix also suffers from some of these issues with its
simplified signal handling; which process in a group gets the signal is
underspecified
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