erlang's "process"

[David Garamond]

i watched the LL2 video last night:

  http://ll2.ai.mit.edu/

and found joe armstrong's presentation about the erlang language 
interesting. i visited the erlang's homepage and browse around for a while.

from what i can see, erlang's approach to parallel programming is with 
user-level processes, and not os-/user-level threads. the erlang process 
does not share any data with other processes, and all communication 
("user-level IPC") is done with messages. perl's ithreads is somewhat 
like this too, i believe, in which thread creation will produce a 
per-thread copy of global variables. unless specifically specified as 
shared, all global variables are not shared by default.

i'm wondering if python has/will have a similar approach too. one of the 
frequent traps/complexities of multithread programming is about managing 
shared access to data. the nothing-is-shared approach is interesting in 
this regard.

--
dave