Of course task means several things, depending on the context (and I do believe Dianne Hackborne qualified its use in the context of UI design).
Let me give another example of how words can lead to confusion out of context. I once told a former boss that the crux of a programming problem I was working on was that it was generalized as a "process". He adametly rejected my conclusion, I think because he didn't understand that what I meant was the use case of the problem was "a sequence of steps leading to an end". In this case, we were trying to create a mobile application for a shipping company. The end in this case was delivering the shipment. Maybe if I had used different terminlogy, I would not have quit that job. I have another observation of the meaning of "process" as it relates to the Android "running app" issue. Notice that in unix, the running code can do an exec system call (indeed, classically, this is how the shell launched a command via the fork/exec pattern), which loads a different code image in the current address space (indeed, creating a new addreess space) and passes control to it. This is true even in Windows, if I'm not mistaken. Notice than in this case the process identity (it's pid) is unchanged, yet what it does and the info displayed in ps, top, or Task Manager is utterly changed. So this raises the question, even in the traditional desktop context, what really is a process? We tend to think that a process and an application are identical. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
