ANN: PyLinda 0.3

[Andrew Wilkinson]

PyLinda 0.3

By Andrew Wilkinson <aw at cs dot york dot ac dot uk>

Introduction
---------------

Linda is an widely studied distributed computing environment, centred
around the notion of a tuple space. A tuple space is a bag (also called a
multi-set) of tuples. A tuple is an ordered, typed chunk of data. Tuple
spaces exist independently of processes in the system, and the data placed
into a tuple space also exist independently. See "Generative communication
in Linda" (1985) and "Multiple tuple spaces in Linda" both by David
Gelernter for more information on Linda.

PyLinda is a simple implementation of a linda system, however it also
includes several of the more recently proposed extensions to Linda in the
form of multiple tuple spaces, garbage collection, sane non-blocking
primitives and bulk tuple operations.

Full details can be found at the website
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~aw/pylinda

The package can be downloaded from
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~aw/pylinda/linda-0.3.tar.gz

Changes In This Version
---------------

- Efficency Updates
 * Switched to using System V Shared Memory where available.
 * Switched to using Unix domain sockets where available.
 * Switched to using map instead of an explicit loop in several places.
 * Changed main message handler to a dictionary of functions instead of a
big if/elif statement.