Friday 27 July 2007

a question for today

I have time only for a question which came out from mail exchanges between Gary and me, on one of the basic points we are discussing, in fact an old problem since 1970s:
How can we represent that elegant, that nice "call-return (or *request-reply*) structure in asynchronously communicating processes?
Here our question is not when a conversation as a whole has the request-reply structure: rather when this structure occurs inside a conversation, as a micro protocol. You ask somebody a question: and perhaps he will ask somebody else (or even you) a different question: and after a few (or a few thousands) interactions he will reply to you. But these two interactions are paired: how do we represent it?

In the next post I will continue what I started in the previous post. And some posts later we shall be able to come back to this question. Today I just post the question.