| Hi Larry The semantics of PRI PAR, PRI ALT and my when (intended to reflect prioritised vectored interrupts (PVI)) are quite different. PRI ALT is merely a 'choice' operator, i.e. a selection, with no pre-emption. If something more important demands a response once the choice is made then tough. It also presents problems when combined in parallel with others of its ilk, causing Bill Roscoe (Understanding Concurrent Systems (UCS), p.487) to abandon "prioritised choice". Whatever approach we take, a 'global' prioritisation of events must be declared, with scope encompassing the entire system affected. PRI PAR is closer to PVI but runs into considerable semantic difficulty : – since, by definition, prioritised processes cannot run concurrently, time-slicing via a scheduler is merely a convenience, obscuring the reality, especially when they communicate via rendezvous – the construct reduces to become meaningless, should enough processors become available to run every process independently (which may be acceptable in practice, but not in theory, since we'd like the meaning of any program to remain the same, without regard to the platform on which it runs); then again it may not be acceptable in practice. Note that, as with PRI ALT, the problem of composition can be overcome with a declaration of prioritisation that has adequate scope. What I seek, and what I think is required for simple, transparent programming of many behaviours must reflect multiple ways in which to interact with a single process, not dissimilar to multiple 'methods' with a single object. The simplest example I can come up with, which is trivial to implement on the humblest micro which supports PVI, is where a single event requires no response but must be counted, and where that count affects somehow the response to other events. This is pretty tricky to accomplish with PRI PAR, and has no use for PRI ALT. The test of a language is whether there are simple, transparent solutions to simple problems. I still want a 'when' construct, in lieu of PVI. I'm of the opinion that shared variables have their rôle to play, and that we should find a way to understand them better in order to use them safely. (UCS does address them, but I have yet to find the time to pursue this further. Ian PS In the description of 'when' below, P, Q, … would each run to termination, following their guard event. I should add that the same difficulty in both interpreting and implementing 'fairness' exists as with ALT (selection/choice). On 1 Oct 2012, at 15:02, Larry Dickson wrote:
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