DDEActor
ptolemy.domains.dde.kernel.DDEActor

An optional base class for DDE actors. DDEActors are intended to execute as autonomous processes that maintain a distributed notion of time. In a DDE model, each actor is controlled by a unique DDEThread. Each DDEThread maintains its actor's local notion of time. Local time information is dependent on the time stamps associated with tokens that are consumed by an actor. More precisely, an actor's local notion of time is equivalent to the maximum time stamp of all tokens that the actor has consumed. Constraints on the consumption of tokens are described in the documentation for DDEThread. Note that consumed tokens may include NullTokens. A NullToken is a subclass of Token that is communicated solely for the purpose of advancing the local notion of time of the actor that consumes the NullToken. <P> The DDE model of computation supports typed, polymorphic actors and does not require this base class for implementation; this class is purely optional. This class provides convenient syntactic shortcuts for developing actors that operate according to DDE semantics.

Author(s): John S. Davis II
Version:$Id: DDEActor.doc.html,v 1.1 2006/02/22 18:40:26 mangal Exp $
Pt.Proposed Rating:Yellow (davisj)
Pt.Accepted Rating:Yellow (yuhong)