Law-Governed Linda as a Coordination Model

Linda is a very high level communication model which allows processes to communicate without knowing each other's identities and without having to arrange for a definite rendezvous. This high level of abstraction would make Linda particularly suitable for use as a coordination model for open systems, if it were not for the fact that the Linda communication is very unsafe. We propose to remove this deficiency of Linda by means of the concept of law-governed architecture previously applied to centralized and message passing systems. We define a model for Law-Governed Linda (LGL) communication, and we demonstrate its efficacy by means of several illustrative examples.