Law-Governed Linda as a Coordination Model
Naftaly H. Minsky and Jerrold Leichter
Department of Computer Science
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ 08903 USA
minsky@cs.rutgers.edu
leichter@cs.rutgers.edu
Abstract
Linda is a very high level communication model which allows processes to
communicate without knowing each other's identities and without having to
arrange for a definite rendezvous. This high level of abstraction would make
Linda particularly suitable for use as a coordination model for open systems,
if it were not for the fact that the Linda communication is very unsafe. We
propose to remove this deficiency of Linda by means of the concept of
law-governed architecture previously applied to centralized and message passing
systems.
We define a model for Law-Governed Linda (LGL) communication, and we
demonstrate its efficacy by means of several illustrative examples.