APPLICATION-SPECIFIC CONVERSATION SCHEMES FOR ADA PROGRAMS

The paper considers a development of the conversation scheme version p roposed by A. Clematis and V. Gianuzzi in Microprocessing and Micropro gramming (Vol. 32, No, 1-5, 1991) [5] and Computer Languages (Vol. 18, No. 3, 1993) [6]. The authors discussed the methodology of using conv ersations within a conventional concurrent language (Ada), which makes the conversation scheme practical. In our paper we concentrate on the improvements for their scheme. We believe that it is important for th e programmer to have more choice, and propose what could be called a l ibrary of schemes from which the appropriate scheme could be chosen de pending on the application. We discuss ways of setting dynamically the number of processes participating in a conversation; of having differ ent sets of servers involved in different alternates of the same conve rsation; of introducing a global acceptance test which would be more s ophisticated; of increasing robustness of the conversation. All of the se proposals are meant to be used within a conventional language.