UKC ANSAware Survival Guide (for Modula-3)
Ian Buckner · Kent Academic Repository (University of Kent) · 1997
So you need to write an ANSAware application in Modula-3 but don't know where to start?This document will try to break you in as gently as possible by explaining the concepts you need to understand and then showing you how ANSAware implements them.Although the concepts are general, the parts of this document that explain how to compile code are specific to UKC. OVERVIEW OF DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS What is a Distributed System?Ok, so you're used to one program which starts, runs and then stops.It contains procedures that perform some function and these are called in turn so that the program performs some required task.In a "distributed system" we take a problem and we build a solution from several different programs that all talk to one another, when we can make these programs communicate over some network we are able to have each one run on a different machine.It is this that makes a distributed systems solution so useful; these programs may run on machines on other side of the room or the other side of the world.Another important aspect of distributed systems is "relocation" -if one of our machines stops working then we might be able to start that part of the system on another machine somewhere else and carry on.