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Show CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK 6.1 Summary of Results This thesis started with the goal to establish introspection as a useful concept in computer science. The goal was divided into subgoals in three main areas: • to provide a concise definition of introspection, • to find useful applications, • to provide efficient implementation strategies. . The problems in all three areas have been successfully solved. A definition of introspection is based on the calculus of Delta Sets. The calculus provides a uniform way to describe process states and transitions between states. The primary object of study in the calculus of delta sets is the state of a process as opposed to the program in traditional approaches. The calculus of delta sets provides a natural way to describe the computational behavior of a process. This behavior of is captured in an execution stream which provides a complete description of the computational behavior of the process. Two types of applications are studied, program directing and program augmenting. New applications enabled by introspective computers include dynamic program visualization, conversational computing, and new real time algorithms for infinite loop detection, checkpoint and garbage collection, among others. |
