At 17:36 +0530 12/17/02, Aravind Srivaths wrote:
To my knowledge that is impossible. Each interpreter is a "universe" on its own.> I'm not sure I understand what the problem is here or what you're > trying to achieve or point out. Could you elaborate? Ok, let me start with a question instead - is it possible for two instances of the interpreter to hold one reference each to a variable?
If this is possible, then it must be possible to implement shared variables by just housing them in a special interpreter instance and incrementing reference count every time a clone is done. Is this how it is really implemented?
Unfortuntately that is not the way it is implemented.
That's probably because the interpreter doesn't know. As far as the interpreter is concerned, a shared variable is a variable like any other variable that is tied: it calls specific functions to fetch and store values. It's what happens inside those routines, that makes the variables appear as shared when running under threads.Next how is scoping implemented for shared variables - how does the 'special interpreter' where shared variables live know what stash to fetch the variable from? I could not figure this from the code.
Hope this explains it a bit.
Liz
