[Info-vax] VMS Forever?

[Bob Eager]

On Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:00:02 UTC, glen herrmannsfeldt 
<gah at ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:

> MetaEd <metaed at gmail.com> wrote:
> (snip)
> > Threads are, in essence, program counters. By this definition, if a
> > process's address space has exactly one program counter, that is a
> > single thread. If it has multiple program counters, it is multi-
> > threaded. Threads are also styled as lightweight processes.
> 
> Personally, I don't like the name 'process'.  It makes the
> term multiprocessing ambiguous.  (It should refer to multiple
> physical (or virtual) processors.  Besides, everyone now knows
> what multitasking means even if they don't know which end of
> a computer us up.)

What word would you use? Task, I guess. But not 'thread', which has a 
distinct meaning.

I always use the term 'process'. A process runs on a processor...that 
seems sensible, that's all.

> There is, in addition, on many systems vfork(), optimized for
> the case when exec() will be called, to avoid some work duplicating
> an address space that will then go away.

But it's a bit of a mess...

-- 
Bob Eager