re-entrant

re·en·trant

also re-en·trant R0112600 (rē-ĕn′trənt)adj.1. Reentering; pointing inward.2. Music Of or relating to strings that, when plucked in order, make a discontinuously rising and falling sequence of pitches: a lute with reentrant tuning.n. A reentrant angle or part.

re-entrant

(riːˈɛntrənt) adj1. (Fortifications) (of an angle, esp in fortifications) pointing inwards. Compare salient²2. (Mathematics) maths (of an angle in a polygon) greater than 180° and thus pointing inwardsnan angle or part that points inwards

Thesaurus

Adj.

re-entrant - (of angles) pointing inward; "a polygon with re-entrant angles"reentrantsalient - (of angles) pointing outward at an angle of less than 180 degrees

Translations

re-entrant

(programming)Used to describe code which can have multiplesimultaneous, interleaved, or nested invocations which willnot interfere with each other. This is important forparallel 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 andany read-only data but, for the code to be re-entrant, eachinvocation must use its own copy of any modifiable data (orsynchronised access to shared data). This is most oftenachieved using a stack and allocating local variables in anew stack frame for each invocation. Alternatively, thecaller may pass in a pointer to a block of memory which thatinvocation can use (usually for outputting the result) or thecode may allocate some memory on a heap, especially if thedata must survive after the routine returns.

Re-entrant code is often found in system software, such asoperating systems and teleprocessing monitors. It is alsoa crucial component of multithreaded programs where the term"thread-safe" is often used instead of "re-entrant".

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Synonyms for re-entrant

adj (of angles) pointing inward

Synonyms

Antonyms