Stuart Sechrest

EECS Department
University of California, Berkeley
Technical Report No. UCB/CSD-88-458
October 1988

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1988/CSD-88-458.pdf

An environment is a set of name-value bindings, maintained for a particular user, that are provided to a process at runtime. This can provide a great deal of flexibility in tailoring the behavior of programs to a particular user's preferences. It can also serve as a simple means of interprocess communication. To be useful, however, the environment must take into account the natural structure of a user's work. Groups of cooperating processes form jobs and should share certain bindings. At the same time, processes in different jobs running on the same machine should share other bindings. A flat name space for bindings does not provide sufficient structure to handle these overlapping sets of shared bindings. The PPM Environment Manager provides an environment with a variety of contexts, allowing bindings to be, for example, machine-specific or application-specific. The environment, however, remains simple to use. The PPM Environment Manager was designed to support multiprocess programs, distributed programs, and programs offloaded in a network of machines. A prototype has been implemented on top of UNIX 4.3BSD.

BibTeX citation:

@techreport{Sechrest:CSD-88-458,
    Author = {Sechrest, Stuart},
    Title = {The PPM Environment Manager},
    Institution = {EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley},
    Year = {1988},
    Month = {Oct},
    URL = {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1988/6070.html},
    Number = {UCB/CSD-88-458},
    Abstract = {An environment is a set of name-value bindings, maintained for a particular user, that are provided to a process at runtime. This can provide a great deal of flexibility in tailoring the behavior of programs to a particular user's preferences. It can also serve as a simple means of interprocess communication. To be useful, however, the environment must take into account the natural structure of a user's work. Groups of cooperating processes form jobs and should share certain bindings. At the same time, processes in different jobs running on the same machine should share other bindings. A flat name space for bindings does not provide sufficient structure to handle these overlapping sets of shared bindings. The PPM Environment Manager provides an environment with a variety of contexts, allowing bindings to be, for example, machine-specific or application-specific. The environment, however, remains simple to use. The PPM Environment Manager was designed to support multiprocess programs, distributed programs, and programs offloaded in a network of machines. A prototype has been implemented on top of UNIX 4.3BSD.}
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Report
%A Sechrest, Stuart
%T The PPM Environment Manager
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 1988
%@ UCB/CSD-88-458
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1988/6070.html
%F Sechrest:CSD-88-458