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- adjective Of an interpreter, it means that commands are assumed to be executed simultaneously (although actually they are interleaved by the operating system under timesharing). The advantage of this is that commands which take a long time to process, eg. 'wh T', don't hold up the other players. The disadvantage is that the system of signals and waits necessary to protect critical zones of code add complexity baggage which makes the interpreter hard to program and robs the definition language of much of its power. Compare synchronous.
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23rd September 1999: asynchronous.htm