Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!usenet.pasdenom.info!news.lightlink.com!news.iecc.com!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:50:04 -0500 From: cri@tiac.net (Richard Harter) Newsgroups: comp.programming Subject: Re: parallel programming Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2011 05:49:57 GMT Message-ID: <4e8948d9.471349954@text.giganews.com> References: <90b45b75-2a5e-4390-9436-8c5fe5ccd06c@z41g2000yqb.googlegroups.com> <4e7cf020.91690274@text.giganews.com> <11mqgf2emmey1.168vxn0ccau5g.dlg@40tude.net> <4e8333f9.72788007@text.giganews.com> <6zren1hsy8gn.10pqzmgvm8g55.dlg@40tude.net> <4e842854.135345671@text.giganews.com> <4e849a00.164446675@text.giganews.com> X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.1/32.230 Lines: 45 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-cw2Gvfj3zmedRl8x3NRe3/T0wKqFUalQQLMSuUnvEj8+A+Ex0jl9RzWsVC6uk/kUkr1T7oXD+LDov4A!a40qqc/tZPAGvHBGJCC/+FsOM70ALst87/szNgspz/JqIzZQLLmwuQJsctX+SYqC X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 3122 Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.programming:900 On Sat, 1 Oct 2011 20:27:12 +0200, "Dmitry A. Kazakov" wrote: >On Sat, 01 Oct 2011 16:12:55 GMT, Richard Harter wrote: [snip] >> Okay. It's not clear to me that that "sharing" is a useful way to >> think of connectivity but you can look at it that way. In flow based >> programming connectivity ordinarily 1-to-1 and almost never n-to-1. I >> hope you will forgive me, but I'm skeptical about actors being n-to-1. >> The term, actors, refers to a number of different related approaches. > >Purely mathematically, if you have only 1-to-1, the resulting graph would >be a chain of nodes. I doubt it capable to do anything useful. > >You can send messages to an actor from any other actor. That is n-to-1. I am skeptical about this being a requirement in any actors based implementation. It certainly isn't in flow based programming. >Also I think it is vital to this framework, that an actor does not know who >was the sender. 1-to-1 would mean that it knows. This doesn't follow; one can know that one is getting a message from a singular source without knowing what the source is. > >Another issue is reuse. If actors as software components are subject to >reuse, then n-to-1 is a requirement. Components that cannot be reused have >little or no value. Another non sequitur. > >P.S. I am not going to advocate the actor model here. It is too powerful to >be safe or efficient. It occurs to me that there is a major misunderstanding. Almost none of what I was writing about was an "actors" implementation. Originally I made it quite clear that there were two distinct related paradigms, flow based and actors based, and that I was talking about flow based. I have mentioned this regularly; you seem not to have noticed.