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Re: Concurrency: hypothetical variables and atomic blocks

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From:
Darren Duncan
Date:
June 2, 2006 11:16
Subject:
Re: Concurrency: hypothetical variables and atomic blocks
Message ID:
p06230900c0a537f8691b@[192.168.1.101]
At 1:50 PM -0700 6/1/06, Larry Wall wrote:
>As for side-effecty ops, many of them can just be a promise to perform
>the op later when the transaction is committed, I suspect.

Yes, but it would be important to specify that by the time control is 
returned to whatever invoked the op, that any side effects will have 
been successful as well, or a failure/exception is still thrown. 
What happens in Perl itself and what happens as external side effects 
are tied together from the invoker's point of view as one unit that 
should entirely succeed or entirely fail.  Even if the side-effects 
are put off as late as possible in the transaction, we still need to 
know whether they succeeded or not.

On a related note, if there is some external system used in a 
transaction that can't guarantee a successful rollback on failure, 
then any error returned by the Perl op to its invoker should 
differentiate between whether a failure included a successful 
rollback in the external system, or whether said system is now 
possibly or actually in an inconsistent state, so the invoker knows 
whether or not it should be safe to proceed.  Similarly, if the 
external system can't guarantee successful completion before it 
returns control, the invoker should know that vs when completion is 
guaranteed.

In other words, an invoker of an op should know whether the op is 
ACID compliant in all parts of its operation or not.

-- Darren Duncan

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