News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Data Processing -- Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid by mgreenbe on Thursday July 02, 2009 @01:50PM (#684801)
Idempotency is a property of mathematical functions: f : X -> X is idempotent iff f(f(x)) = f(x) for all x in X. Absolute value is an example of an idempotent function.

Reentrancy is a property of computational functions: a function f is reentrant if two copies of f can run at the same time (in the same memory space, etc. -- the details vary) and both copies behave as if the other weren't running. This can exclude or restrict, e.g. static fields or global variables.

There are no comments on this comment yet.