Re: Process instantiation puzzle

   [Bijan Parsia]
   An aside: I conclude from Drew's lack of response that I can declare 
   victory :)

A more plausible conclusion is that I'm drowning in e-mail.  I have
had an amazing number of offers to share some money left by retired
(and coincidentally deceased) African dictators, and I expect to
become very wealthy in the near future.

   [Sudhir Agarwal]
   > in my opinion, it depends on, who is controlling the execution of C.

   I disagree. It depends on 1) what services the process occurances 
   actually get instantiated to, and 2) how the service provider 
   implements the advertized semantics.

   Someone, somewhere, has to care about 1. Someone, sometimes, other than 
   the provider, might care about 2 but it may typically be the case that 
   she can't know anything and needn't be bothered by the fact.

Sorry I echoed your somewhere, somewhen, someone prosody.  The puzzle
seems to cry out for it.  

   I am, of course, assuming that the semantics of these various 
   alternative Drew puts forth all respect the semantics of the 
   description under which P was selected. Indeed, if P was abstract, I 
   can see P's occurences being bound to services from *two different 
   providers*.

I think we're getting somewhere.  What do you mean by "the semantics
of the description under which P was selected"?  Is this description
rich enough to settle the issue of what sorts of things P1 and P2 are?
Where is the description to be found?  What language is it expressed
in?  What is the semantics of that language?

   Take a simpler example. I do a series of GETs on an URI. I have NO CLUE 
   whether I'm getting a single web server, something out of a farm, 
   something from an intermediate cache or proxy. Nor do I care. Nor 
   should I, in most cases.

   I certianly can *build* some of these distinctions in, perhaps, but the 
   possibility of don't know, don't care needs to be preserved, and is 
   probably the default.

I'm willing to let stateless interaction be the default, as for the
global atomic-clock service.  I want to know how we indicate that
we've strayed from the default.

-- 
                                             -- Drew McDermott
                                                Yale University CS Dept.

Received on Friday, 19 September 2003 17:23:22 UTC