Talk:Channel (programming)

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Confusing the abstract with the concrete

"They are similar to pipelines, but may contain arbitrary unserialised objects instead of lines of text, and are used within a single program for coordination, rather than across several programs."

A pipeline is an important implementation of concurrency that uses the channel construct.
The reader is not sure what is meant by "lines of text" inside the same sentence as the reference to arbitrary objects.
C.A.R. Hoare of CSP fame did not depend on the notion of 'objects' to convey the notion of 'channel'. Neither did Holtzmann of SPIN/PROMELA fame.
The statement that channels "are used within a single program for coordination, rather than across several programs" is simply not true. Hoare's intention back in 1984 is for channels to span several processes, where each process may be implemented as its own program. Perhaps in the specific implementations in the references cited, channels may have been used between *threads* rather than between *programs*, but that may simply reflect the limitations of those languages or software tools. Vonkje (talk) 15:54, 7 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]