[E-Lang] remote comms

[Karp, Alan]

Our experience with e-speak supports the view that it is convenient to have
a class of things that go away when the connection is dropped.  Resources in
e-speak can be defined in a "transient" context or in a "persistent"
context.  The former are automatically deleted when the connection is lost.
One place where the use of transient resources has been a big help is in the
handling of guest accounts.  All we need to do is make sure that guests
can't register persistent resources, and the system cleans up after itself
when they disconnect (or are forcibly disconnected).  At one point we
discussed giving each user a different quota for transient and persistent
resources, but we haven't found a compelling need yet.

People seem to be quite comfortable with this distinction and use both
contexts with approximately equal frequency.  However, in support of Zooko's
point, newbies have been known to report bugs that turn out to be due to
transient resources that they assumed were persistent.

_________________________
Alan Karp
Principal Scientist
Decision Technology Department
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories MS 1U-2
1501 Page Mill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304
(650) 857-3967, fax (650) 857-6278
https://ecardfile.com/id/Alan_Karp
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Alan_Karp/