Re-entrant

4 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Reentrant \Re*en"trant\ (-trant), a.
     Reentering; pointing or directed inwards; as, a reentrant
     angle.
     [1913 Webster]

From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:



  re-entrant
       adj : (of angles) pointing inward; "a polygon with re-entrant
             angles" [syn: {reentrant}] [ant: {salient}]

From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:

  reentrant
       adj : (of angles) pointing inward; "a polygon with re-entrant
             angles" [syn: {re-entrant}] [ant: {salient}]

From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) [foldoc]:

  re-entrant
       
           Used to describe code which can have multiple
          simultaneous, interleaved, or nested invocations which will
          not interfere with each other.  This is important for
          {parallel processing}, {recursive} functions or subroutines,
          and {interrupt handling}.
       
          It is usually easy to arrange for multiple invocations
          (e.g. calls to a subroutine) to share one copy of the code and
          any read-only data but, for the code to be re-entrant, each
          invocation must use its own copy of any modifiable data (or
          synchronised access to shared data).  This is most often
          achieved using a {stack} and allocating local variables in a
          new {stack frame} for each invocation.  Alternatively, the
          caller may pass in a pointer to a block of memory which that
          invocation can use (usually for outputting the result) or the
          code may allocate some memory on a {heap}, especially if the
          data must survive after the routine returns.
       
          Re-entrant code is often found in system software, such as
          {operating systems} and {teleprocessing monitors}.  It is also
          a crucial component of {multithreaded} programs where the term
          "thread-safe" is often used instead of "re-entrant".
       
          (1996-12-21)