Syntax: role or participant

[Nicholas Ng]

Dear all,

I have encountered a lot of use case where the term 'role' keyword to
declare participants makes sense in a protocol, and usually that 'role'
is referring to a generic group of participants, eg. Workers or Sellers.
However it is unnatural when a 'role' is referring to a single
participant, eg. Broker or Root (coordinator in parallel programming
context), and 'participant' would be a more suitable keyword. This had
been pointed out in multiple discussions with people unfamiliar with
Scribble. I remember in very early version of Scribble, the keyword
'participant' was used; I am not sure why 'role' is chosen over
'participant' eventually, but I would suggest adding 'participant' as a
keyword to use in addition to 'role' without changing its semantics and
allow to use the two keywords interchangeably without forcing to use one
over another.

Perhaps there are better alternatives or reasons no to do that, I hope
this could spark some constructive discussions.

Thanks,
Nick
--
Nicholas Ng
E: nic...@doc.ic.ac.uk
W: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~cn06

[Nobuko Yoshida]

Dear Gary,

I guess you have known why Scribble changed to role?

Best regards, 

Nobuko 

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[Gary Brown]

The original reasons if I remember correctly was role is more concise and is a logical concept without having to constrain which participants perform each role.

This also reflected how OOI wanted to describe protocols. I.e. mapping role to participant at runtime.

BTW in Boston this week so responding may be patchy.

Regards
Gary