LOGO-L> Re: Logo with parallel processes vs. ToonTalk

[bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey)]

"Ken Kahn" <KenKahn@ToonTalk.com> writes:
>And yes, languages like ToonTalk can have 100,000 processes each doing
>procedure calls.

Now I'm really lost.  You argued that procedure calling is bad because
they require stack frames, whereas processes are good because they don't.
I asked, why does it matter whether state information is on a stack or
in a heap -- either you need the state information, in which case it
doesn't matter where you store it, or you don't need it, in which case
it certainly doesn't matter where you don't store it.  You were proposing
parallelism as an alternative to composition of functions.  And I still
don't see why parallelism requires less storage than composition of
functions.

>So are objects private to a process? How do they communicate between
>processes? Or is it that the instance variables of the objects are private
>to the process, but object references are global?

Data that belongs to an object shouldn't be a problem; the object is
in charge of that data, and it ensures the atomicity of requests to
use the data, which it can do because it exports the methods to access
the data.  It's data not belonging to an object that we have to worry about.


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