Subject: Be brave. Be sure.

From: Steven Ericsson Zenith <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Feb 93 23:45:23 -0600

It will probably come as no surprise that I, for one, have no fear of
being politically incorrect in these matters ;-) I am not afraid to say
that I think at this stage it would be a very good idea to define only
process composition and blocking send/recv. The rest comes - more or
less - as a construction of the other two. Process ids are simply a many
to one channel descriptor - implementable by a single process,
non-synchronized communication is simply a process creation, broadcast
is a composition of N sends with N receives, and such an interface can be
implemented by all the available technologies.  In addition this
simplification would greatly aid the task of the poor programmer.

Where is the innovation in this forum? It seems that we are pandering to
the lowest common denominator. Has noone learnt anything in the past 7/8
years?

Otherwise we should simply take an existing system (PVM for example,
though there are many well designed MP systems) and adopt it as the
accepted standard, work from that point and be done with it.  The
interface efforts of the Unix community (e.g., DCE and sockets) may well
out run this one.

Steven

---

From: [email-masked] (Paul Kelly)
Date: Fri, 5 Feb 93 11:04:36 GMT

Steve,

> I am not afraid to say that I think at this stage it would be a very
> good idea to define only process composition and blocking send/recv.
> The rest comes - more or less - as a construction of the other two.
> Process ids are simply a many to one channel descriptor -
> implementable by a single process, non-synchronized communication is
> simply a process creation, broadcast is a composition of N sends with
> N receives, and such an interface can be implemented by all the
> available technologies.

You just described occam. 

One thing I have learnt from the last 10 years is that that's NOT
ENOUGH.

-- Jim
James Cownie 
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