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NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:17:19 -0600
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:17:14 -0800
From: Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org>
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Subject: Re: Volatile happens before question
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On 1/17/2012 5:14 PM, Peter Duniho wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:49:58 -0800, Patricia Shanahan wrote:
...
>> The potential incorrect intuition is that there is a total order of all
>> events in a Java program. There isn't. [...]
>
> I think I understand what you're saying and I don't disagree, but the fact
> remains that it is reasonable to consider the order of execution of
> statements within the program relative to each other, as if it _were_
> possible to identify a total order.  After all, any time there's a conflict
> (e.g. two different threads writing atomically to the same memory location
> at once), the CPU does pick a winner, even if non-deterministically.

I agree that total ordering is a reasonable model of single processor
operations, where there is such a thing as "the" CPU.

Patricia