Loose type checking in E

[Tyler Close]

At 12:41 PM 10/12/98 -0700, you wrote:
>Unfortunately, as you use this strategy with increasing vigor, the method
>degrades the advantages of multiple threads--things start acting more and
>more linearly. Even though CDC had such a hierarchy built  into its opsys,
>CDC did not use the hierarchy for all its opsys resources--some resources
>needed to be accessed with such speed that to make the system efficient,
>they left 'em out of the hierarchy. Deadlocks on these resources
>consequently occurred every so often (maybe once a day), and the CDC
>answer--which was absolutely reasonable in their context--was to say, hey,
>let the sys admin guy break the deadlock manually when he sees that one has
>occurred.

I don't think you understand the tree protocol. Separate sub-trees of the
overall tree can be used concurrently without any waiting or deadlock. If
there are resources that are used very frequently, then these should be
placed at or near the leaf nodes of your tree.

Be careful with how far you take your operating system resources analogy.
There is no inherent tree structure to distinct resources in an operating
system. There is, however, an inherent tree structure to a GUI.

>Strange but true stories of the antiquity of computing :-)

We're still in the antiquity of computing ;)

ciao,
Tyler