RE: [moss@cs.umass.edu: Re: JavaMemoryModel: Motivation and Semantics for Immutable objects]

From: Evan Ireland (eireland@sybase.com)
Date: Sun Oct 19 2003 - 18:06:03 EDT


Eliot,

Fine point, that when discussing the notion of immutability, it is not
necessarily recursive, although that case is often of interest.

It seems that Matthew's request has received only a couple of quick
comments, mine included. Does anyone else support Matthew's proposal
for immutability support to be added to the JMM?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Evan Ireland [mailto:eireland@sybase.com]
> Sent: Monday, 20 October 2003 10:53 a.m.
> To: eireland@sybase.com
> Subject: [moss@cs.umass.edu: Re: JavaMemoryModel: Motivation and
> Semantics for Immutable objects]
>
>
> ------- Start of forwarded message -------
> Return-Path: <owner-javamemorymodel@cs.umd.edu>
> From: Eliot Moss <moss@cs.umass.edu>
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> Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 22:26:46 -0400
> To: Matthew Ford <Matthew.Ford@forward.com.au>
> Cc: javaMemoryModel@cs.umd.edu
> Subject: Re: JavaMemoryModel: Motivation and Semantics for
> Immutable objects
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> One quick comment, FWIW ...
>
> I learned early on in working with data abstraction to work hard at not
> confusing the state of one object with another. Considering, for
> example, a
> collection type, say Set, the _state_ of a Set is the (mathematical set of
> the) _identities_ of the objects in the Set. To say this again, it has to
> do with which objects are in the Set, not what their current states are.
> Hence, the notion of immutabilty is _not_ necessarily recursive.
> It depends
> on what you are trying to do.
>
> The Clu programming language, designed nearly 30 years ago, had
> mutable and
> immutable versions of each of its fundamental non-primitive data types,
> corresponding roughly to structs, unions, and arrays.
>
> Eliot Moss
> ==================================================================
> ============
> J. Eliot B. Moss, Associate Professor
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> Priscilla Coe sec'y
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