Talk:Concurrent computing: Difference between revisions

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That's the only difference. Parallel computing IS concurrent computing. But concurrent computing is not always parallel computing. Although unlikely, they don't need to interact either.<small>—The preceding [[Wikipedia:Sign your posts on talk pages|unsigned]] comment was added by [[Special:Contributions/142.167.85.107|142.167.85.107]] ([[User talk:142.167.85.107|talk]]) 07:42, 16 February 2007 (UTC).</small><!-- HagermanBot Auto-Unsigned -->
 
That's wrong. Parallelism is a property of computers, meaning that the control flow executes on multiple pathways in parallel. Concurrency, on the other hand, is a property of programs and programming languages, meaning they have constructs designed to exploit parallelism. Note that concurrent programs can run on ordinary, sequential computers as well -- simply by `simulating' parallelism, for example using multithreading --, and that ordinary sequential programs can exploit parallelism if the compiler performs appropriate transformations/optimizations.
So parallelism and concurrency are closely related, but both express a different view of what one might call the same underlying idea.
The article currently blurs the distinction between parallelism and concurrency, which is very unfortunate as the distinction is widely agreed upon in computer science and very useful from an educational and engineering point of view. Without this distinction, it becomes very difficult to concisely and precisely talk about things like realizing concurrency in the presence or absence of different forms of parallelism. I would be glad if the article could be modified to take this into account; however, I would leave this change to someone who is more familiar with the article.