[plug] Threads

[Trevor Phillips]

On Friday 14 February 2003 11:05, James Elliott wrote:
> This might seem like a silly question from an IT graduate, but I have never
> been really sure what the word "Thread" means, and it is used a lot.
>
> I just saw it in the subject matter of a PLUG e-mail;  "threads" are talked
> about in the context of bulletin boards and e-mail lists; "fast threading"
> devices are advertised ..... I know the difference between and Application
> and a Process and have a sort of intuitive feeling about what "threads"
> might be, but if anyone would take the time to define threads or explain
> them, I would be obliged.

In the context of bulletin boards & E-mail a thread is a single topic, or 
string of related messages. Someone starts with a message, someone replies to 
that message - the second message has headers IDing it as being a reply to 
the original. So, if you sort by threads, you can read a topic of discussion 
in order, sticking to that one topic (to a degree -_^), rather than reading 
them in date order, and mixing the topics up together.

Since there may be several replies to a message, depending on how the thread 
is handled, going to the "next" message may either go to the first reply of 
the current message, or the next reply to the parent message.

-- 
. Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ . 
: Web Technical Administrator     -          T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au : 
| IT Services                        -              Murdoch University | 
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