Sequential vs. Concurrent Programming Languages

Programming languages fall into two categories: sequential and concurrent. Sequential languages are languages that were designed for writing sequential programs and have no linguistic constructs for describing concurrent computations. Concurrent programming languages are languages that were designed for writing concurrent programs and have special constructs for expressing concurrency in the language itself.

In Erlang, concurrency is provided by the Erlang virtual machine and not by the operating system or by any external libraries. In most sequential programming languages, concurrency is provided as an interface to the concurrency primitives of the host operating system.

The distinction between ...

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