MFELDMAN@GWUVM.BITNET (Mike Feldman) (01/05/88)
RE: Ada books concenrating on the rendezvous: Narain Gehani, "Ada: Concurrent Programming", Prentice Hall 1984. Alan Burns: "Concurrent Programming in Ada", Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985. Both are informed and literate tutorials and assessments of the Ada tasking model. The Burns one is more critical, based on a serious dissertation done in the UK. Some of the things Gehani criticizes about Ada tasking are "fixed" (albeit in the C world) in a very interesting Bell Labs toy called Concurrent C, which glues Ada tasking model onto C. It's a preprocessor/runtime library setup; last time I checked it was available (only) to universities. Contact Narain Gehani at AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill. There is a new book by Ken Shumate (which may or may not be in print yet) which does a fair amount of system design using tasking. I've seen some of the examples; some have been published in AdaLetters recently. Looks like a good book. I think the publisher is Harper & Row. For another view of tasking, check out George Cherry, "Parallel Programming in ANSI Standard Ada", Prentice-Hall. I think the other books are more objective and analytical, though.