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NAME

mlbrpc_maketid - Make a globally unique Transaction Identifier (TID)

SYNOPSIS

mlbrpc_maketid
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DESCRIPTION

The mlbrpc_maketid generates a globally unique value that can be used as a transaction identifier in MLbRPC systems and other distributed computing applications. The returned TID is a string upto 56 characters long which is unique to this application. The uniqueness is not guaranteed for all time but it is sufficiently difficult to reproduce the TIDs that they can safely be used for most distributed programming envirnments.

SEE ALSO

Tcl-DP, mlbrpc_clientexec

BUGS

The faster the machine on which this is running is, the more likely the uniqueness guarantees will be broken. This is because the TID is related to things such as the real time clock, the process ID of the calling process and the length of a long and so a sufficiently fast machine may be able to wrap (say) the long sequence number round before the clock increments. If you find a machine that can do this, please let me know; I'd like one.

AUTHOR

Jon Knight (J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk) at Loughborough University of Technology, UK.


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