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Re: Fairness for interruptable process



I don't understand something.

If ABABAB... etc is allowed without C (or D) ever taking place ("A could interrupt the process forever"), why require strong, rather than weak fairness on B,C,D for 3b?
After all, C would be enabled infinitely often, but never required to occur. 

Ron


On Friday, January 18, 2019 at 6:52:43 PM UTC, Leslie Lamport wrote:
You seem to have stated the following conditions:

 1a. A is always enabled.

  b. B is enabled only after an A step.
  c. C is enabled only after a B step.
  d. D is enabled only after a C step.

 2. A D step eventually occurs after every A step.

What you don't make clear is whether 

 3a. Only a finite number of A,B,C, and D steps may occur.

  b. A finite or infinite number of those steps may occur.
  c. An infinite number of those steps must occur.

Conditions 1a-d are safety conditions and should be a consequence

of the definition of the next-state action.

Conditions 1a-d imply that Condition 2 is equivalent to strong

fairness of the B, C, and D actions.

That's all you need for 3b.  For 3c, you just need to add weak

fairness of A. For 3a, you need to modify 1a to allow D to disable A,
and have strong fairness on such a D action that does disable A.

All of this assumes that in 3, zero is a finite number.  You'll have

to modify the solutions for 3a and 3b  if you want to ensure that at 
least one A step occurs.

Leslie