[cap-talk] Wall banging (was: Bellizzomi, Capabilities, Shapiro's focus, Coyotos, etc.)

[Kevin Reid]

On Nov 30, 2006, at 5:37, Matej Kosik wrote:
> Mark S. Miller wrote:
>> In E, no auditing of source code is necessary to enforce  
>> determinism, and so it can be enforced on black boxes. The safe  
>> scope, containing the caps universally provided by convention,  
>> contain no caps that would enable a program to escape determinism.  
>> Unless a program is provided a cap that enables non-determinism,  
>> it cannot be non-deterministic.
>
> Do you say that the following statement is true?
>
>   "let vat1, vat2, vat3, ... , vatN be deterministic vats
>    then system of these vats is also deterministc."
>
> If it were true, that would be great, however if I understand  
> thesemantics of E correctly, it is not.

The safe scope does not include inter-vat references (which do enable  
nondeterminism as you described). I expect MarkM was including such  
references as 'caps that enable nondeterminism'.

-- 
Kevin Reid                            <http://homepage.mac.com/kpreid/>