15.1. Introduction
It would be nice if we could perform one action at a time and perform it well, but that is usually difficult to do. The human body performs a great variety of operations in parallel—or, as we will say throughout this chapter, concurrently. Respiration, blood circulation, digestion, walking and talking, for example, can occur concurrently. All the senses— sight, touch, smell, taste and hearing—can be employed at once. Computers, too, perform operations concurrently—compiling a program, sending a file to a printer and receiving electronic mail messages can all occur in parallel.
Ironically, most programming languages do not enable programmers to specify concurrent activities. Rather, programming languages generally provide only ...
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