Gem #49: Safe and Secure Software: Chapter 10, Safe Concurrency

by John Barnes

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In real life many activities happen in parallel. Human beings do thing in parallel with considerable ease. Females seem to do this better than males – perhaps because they have to rock the baby while cooking the food and keeping the tiger out of the cave. The male typically just concentrates on one thing at a time such as catching that rabbit for dinner – or trying to fin his in-law’s cave without asking for directions.

Computers traditionally only do one thing at a time, and the operating system makes it look as if several things are going on in parallel. This is not quite so true these days, since many computers do truly have multiple processors but it still does apply to the vast majority of small computers including those used in process control.

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Note: All chapters of this booklet will, in time, be available on the Ada 2005 home page.