Advantages of a large number of threads cf other approaches?

[jonathan@REDACTED]

> Now Simula-67 was developed precisely to support
> object-oriented simulation.  But Simula had TWO key features.  OO was
> one, and (simulated) concurrency was the other.  Simula simulations
> basically used co-operative multithreading.  Bjarn Stroustrup, who
> invented C++, was familiar with Simula 67, and invented it in order to
> do the kind of simulations he was familiar with in a C-friendly/Algol-hostile
> milieu.  Surprise surprise:  the Cfront implementation of C++ from AT&T
> had TWO key features.  OO was one, and (simulated) concurrency was the
> other (the Task Library, chapter 2 of the AT&T C++ library manual).

Interesting - I'd never heard this.
 
> For what it's worth, there is a software development method called
> Jackson Structured Programming, developed years ago and used for serious
> EDP systems.  One of the ideas in JSP is that you design your program as
> a collection of thousands of interacting concurrent processes/objects,
> and then "invert" the design to get your COBOL, because you obviously
> can't *really* have thousands of concurrent processes (:-).

Again, that's interesting. I've always heard good things about JSP.