guideline

Consider using single task declarations to declare unique instances of concurrent tasks.

Consider using single protected declarations to declare unique instances of protected objects.

The following example illustrates the syntactic differences between the kinds of tasks and protected objects discussed here. Buffer is static, but its type is anonymous. No type name is declared to enable you to declare further objects of the same type.

task      Buffer;

Because it is declared explicitly, the task type Buffer_Manager is not anonymous. Channel is static and has a name, and its type is not anonymous.

task type Buffer_Manager;
Channel : Buffer_Manager;

rationale

The use of anonymous tasks and protected objects of anonymous type avoids a proliferation of task and protected types that are only used once, and the practice communicates to maintainers that there are no other tasks or protected objects of that type. If the need arises later to have additional tasks or protected objects of the same type, then the work required to convert an anonymous task to a task type or an anonymous protected object to a protected type is minimal.

The consistent and logical use of task and protected types, when necessary, contributes to understandability. Identical tasks can be declared using a common task type. Identical protected objects can be declared using a common protected type. Dynamically allocated task or protected structures are necessary when you must create and destroy tasks or protected objects dynamically or when you must reference them by different names.

notes

Though changing the task or protected object from an anonymous type to a declared type is trivial, structural changes to the software architecture might not be trivial. Introduction of multiple tasks or protected objects of the declared type might require the scope of the type to change and might change the behavior of the network of synchronizing tasks and protected objects.