Hi,

Jason Johnson wrote:

On 10/25/07, Peter William Lount <peter@smalltalk.org> wrote:

 The "process-based model of concurrency" - as used in Erlang - is but one
approach in a wide range of techniques that provide solutions for
concurrency.


A wide range?  I'm aware of variations of only 3 ideas.

What are they?

  Could you expand on "wide range"?

Sure, one only has to search the internet for "concurrency" and one sees a wide range of problems and potential solutions. Look at the Little Book of Semaphores for a breathtaking look at a few of the many possible solutions to various problems. Open your eyes to the wider horizon.

It doesn't solve every problem in concurrency - I don't even
think that they claim that for it. If they do please show us where.


Would you please stop making a statement that I obviously didn't say
(you even quoted me!) and then attacking that statement you made as
though it were mine?  I find that quite disingenuous.

I never said you stated that explicitly - I'd have to check all your postings to find that out. It's implied by what you are saying in many of your postings. At least that is the impression that I'm getting from your writing. You've certainly not acknowledged the opposite.

 Further the example of the one million object graph being processed by
10,000 compute nodes processing the problem is that you don't know in
advance how to slice up the data. If you can know in advance how to slice up
the data then you've simplified and possibly optimized the problem solving.
However, that's the problem, slicing up real world data object sets that are
highly interconnected with each other and processing them in parallel.
That's an example of a more general case. There are other examples that
won't compute with the slice em and dice em approach using the process-based
model of concurrency.


Do you have any real-world cases where it's a problem?  I'm not
interested in solving theoretical problems that never come up in
actual practice.

Yes, the example I gave is a good summary of real world problems that actually occur (and that I'm working to solve for one project). It's not just theory, it's a harsh reality.

Cheers,

Peter