Possible p() & v() confusion

[nhat-nguyen]

Looking at the source code and the examples, it seems to me that the library is using p() to signal/free up a resource, whereas v() is used to wait/"block" on the semaphore.

However, according to the definition of a semaphore, the uses of p() and v() are the other way around. Some resources to verify are:

• http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~rich/class/cs170/notes/Semaphores/index.html
• https://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs343/documents/notes.pdf (counting semaphore, page 104)

Please let me know if I'm misunderstanding the use case here. :)

[OlliV]

Yes you are absolutely correct, the traditional meaning of the terms is unfortunately mixed in this library. However if you think the letters could mean V = verhogen = increase and P = passeren = pass, then we can build a meaningful explanation for the function names. As you probably have noted the implementation is based on a fixed number of tokens distributed to the consumers. Now v() increases the number of registered consumers (either returns a token or puts the consumer to a queue waiting for a token), and p() clearly passes the token back to the Semaphore and eventually to the next waiter in the queue.

Retrospectively thinking I should have probably never used single letter function names anyway but something like acquire() and release(), that would have been a lot more self-explanatory.

[nhat-nguyen]

Thanks for the confirmation. Any chance the API would be updated with more standard names?