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--- at:tutorial:actors [2008/11/03 10:00] – added tvcutsem
+++ at:tutorial:actors [2008/11/04 10:16] – added tvcutsem
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 <note warning>
-A word of warning: isolates are objects that are (deep) copied freely between actors. As a result, they should be objects whose actual object identity is of little importance. Usually, the identity of by-copy objects is determined by the value of some of the object's fields. Therefore, it is good practice to override the ''=='' method on isolates to compare isolates based on their semantic identity, rather than on their object identity. For example, equality for complex numbers should be defined as:
+Isolates are objects that are (deep) copied freely between actors. As a result, they should be objects whose actual object identity is of little importance. Usually, the identity of by-copy objects is determined by the value of some of the object's fields. Therefore, it is good practice to override the ''=='' method on isolates to compare isolates based on their semantic identity, rather than on their object identity. For example, equality for complex numbers should be defined as:
 <code>
 def ==(other) {
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 }
 </code>
+On a related note, it is good practice to consider isolates as //immutable// objects, since modifying an isolate will only modify its local copy.
 </note>
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 >>4
 </code>
+<note>
+Since AmbientTalk 2.12 the interpreter is smart enough to figure out the lexically free variables of an isolate itself. If no variables are explicitly listed, the interpreter will try to figure out which lexically free variables it should implicitly copy. Unlike explicitly listed variables (like ''|x|'' in the above example), these implicitly copied free variables are private to the isolate (so they cannot be accessed from outside the isolate).
+</note>
 ===== Futures =====
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 The key to our conditional synchronization is that the ''when:becomes:'' listener will only be invoked if and when a matching person has registered itself with the dating service. As long as this condition has not been fulfilled, the future will remain unresolved. In fact, the future returned by ''d<-match(p)'' has been resolved with another future, the one returned by ''Questionnaire.wait()''. However, recall that a future resolved by another unresolved future does not really count as being "resolved" and will only trigger its listeners once its "dependent" future has been resolved.
+The complete source code of the above example can be found in the file ''at/demo/DatingService.at'' found in the distribution. The directory ''at/demo'' also contains an example solution to Dijkstra's famous "dining philosophers" problem, which makes use of a similar technique to achieve conditional synchronization of the philosophers.
 ===== Actor Mirrors =====
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 </code>
-If both the ''outer'' and ''inner'' actors lexically see ''x'', they could modify it concurrently, reintroducing race conditions on the internal state of an actor. Therefore, when defining an actor using a block of code, we disallow access to the enclosing lexical scope by the new actor. It is as if it was defined at top-level. Hence, actors behave similarly to [[#isolates|isolates]] in this respect. The above example is incorrect in that ''inner'' will not be able to read or modify ''x''.
+If both the ''outer'' and ''inner'' actors lexically see ''x'', they could modify it concurrently, reintroducing race conditions on the internal state of an actor. Therefore, when defining an actor using a block of code, we disallow direct access to the enclosing lexical scope by the new actor. Actors behave similarly to [[#isolates|isolates]] in this respect. The above example code will work, but the programmer has to keep in mind that the ''x'' variable accessed by ''inner'' is a //copy// of the ''x'' variable of ''outer''. Hence, assignments to ''x'' by ''inner'' will not affect ''outer'' and vice versa.
-Recall that isolates could be given selective access to their enclosing lexical scope by specifying accessed variables as formal parameters to their initializing closure, which gave rise to copying the variable into the isolate. We allow actors to do the same. Hence, the above example can be written properly as:
+Recall that isolates could be given access to their enclosing lexical scope either by specifying accessed variables as formal parameters to their initializing closure or by having the interpreter derive the lexically free variables automatically. If the programmer wants to make explicit the fact that ''x'' is copied, the example can also be rewritten as:
 <code>