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Show point of view. He discusses requirements for computer system to efficiently support conversational computing. One of the requirements is the modification of data and program text [66]: "One of the actions we wish to perform in conversational programming is the systematic, or controlled, modification of values of data and text, as distinguished from the unsystematic modification which occurs in debugging." Another requirement is the ability to monitor programs [66]: "Another one just beginning to appear in languages is the distributed control, which I will call monitoring. Process A continuously monitors process B so that when B attains a certain state, A intervenes to control the future activity of the process." Although Perlis's Turing lecture was given 25 years ago, little work was done on these two requirements. Introspection developed in this thesis presents probably the first realization of the two requirements for conversational computing discussed by Perlis. It enables a continuous monitoring of processes and their controlled modification. The continuous monitoring is defined as a monitoring that has access to all detail of the execution. Regular monitoring is not continuous, since it can observe only specific details about the execution. Hardware monitors allow continuous monitoring, but they are not a part of the programming environment and thus cannot be incorporated in program. Controlled modification of executors is performed by directors using primitives provided by the framework for introspection. This provides a flexible interaction with computer processes needed in conversational computing. 9 |
