Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming, Second Edition

Chapter 2. The Concurrent Programming Abstraction

The Role of Abstraction

Scientific descriptions of the world are based on abstractions. A living animal is a system constructed of organs, bones and so on. These organs are composed of cells, which in turn are composed of molecules, which in turn are composed of atoms, which in turn are composed of elementary particles. Scientists find it convenient (and in fact necessary) to limit their investigations to one level, or maybe two levels, and to “abstract away” from lower levels. Thus your physician will listen to your heart or look into your eyes, but he will not generally think about the molecules from which they are composed. There are other specialists, pharmacologists and biochemists, who study ...