Atomic Actions¶

Actions are divided into Atomic Actions which are performed instantaneously and cannot be decomposed and actions that gather others actions and that usually take time (described in next chapter Compound Actions).

In this chapter, we focus on atomic actions that is, actions that take no time to be performed. Instantaneity is an idealization of the actual computation, see chapter Synchronization for more detailed explanation on this abstraction.

An atomic action corresponds to

• an interaction with the environment through: message passing to MAX/PD receivers, OSC messages, or file writing,

• an assignment,

• the termination of another action,

• an internal command,

• the launching of a process or the creation of an object,

• checking an assertion.

Callback messages are a way to call a function or a process using the syntax of a message, a syntactic commodity which does not introduce a new kind of actions.

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