[cap-talk] Is "Authority" Subjective?

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Sat, 2007-06-23 at 13:03 +0200, Pierre THIERRY wrote:
> Scribit Marc Stiegler dies 22/06/2007 hora 11:33:
> > We generally consider the ability to invoke the object that creates a
> > new List object to be non-authority-bearing.
> 
> Wouldn't it be more consistent if we consider it bearing some authority
> that we want each subject to have? Moreover, this is not authority to
> modify some state, it is merely authority to computation, as you say.

>From a formal perspective, "create" operations are a bit of a mess. They
often lead to models that do not converge. A fairly common trick for
dealing with this is to have a model in which there is a pre-existing
finite pool of objects of each type. The "create" operation actually
changes the state of an existing object from "unallocated" to "in-use"
and the "destroy" operation changes the state of the object from
"in-use" to "destroyed".

While you can choose to model the allocator authority explicitly (and
this is perfectly sensible), create and destroy operations are
intrinsically a bit wierd.

shap