Are Processes Objects? [djg11]

Dennis Marer dmarer@td2cad.intel.com
Mon, 29 Mar 93 09:41:46 PDT


Howdy Moosers!

A few comments on David's mail...

> I feel that each process should provide drivers for 0 or more classes, 
> provide 0 or more public functions, and optionally include a startup 
> and shutdown functions.  

Good - a constructor and destructor possibly, plus some "main" function for
the process to begin execution.  Then, if you wrote a C program, the main()
function would map directly to this function...can anyone think of a better
name than "main" though?

> Among other things, I am not sure what a process object would do with 
> methods to itself besides what I just said, and I don't see any of 
> what I already said requiring the process itself to receive messages 
> to its management object.

In some cases, it would be nice for a process to let other processes access
it.  I've been thinking device drivers almost need to be processes, and if
they were objects their methods would be their interface.  Beyond this, only
a few real applications would need a process interface, like database servers
and so on.  In most cases, a process would need its "main" function and not
much else in its external interface though.

		Dennis