Programming with POSIX ® Threads

1. Introduction

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,“To talk of many things;Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—Of cabbages—and kings—And why the sea is boiling hot— And whether pigs have wings.”

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

In a dictionary, you would probably see that one of several definitions for “thread” is along the lines of the third definition in the American Heritage paperback dictionary on my desk: “Anything suggestive of the continuousness and sequence of thread.” In computer terms, a thread is the set of properties that suggest “continuousness and sequence” within the machine. A thread comprises the machine state necessary to execute a sequence of machine instructions—the location of the current instruction, the machine’s ...