Abstract
Linda is a very high level communication model which allows processes to communicate without knowing each others's identities and without having to arrange for a definite rendezvous. Along with the considerable advantages of this high level of abstraction, Linda carries some serious liabilities: it is very unsafe, and is difficult to optimize. We propose to remove the first of these difficulties, and alleviate the second - while preserving the advantages of Linda - by means of the concept of law-governed architecture previously applied to centralized and message passing systems. We dene a model for Law-Governed Linda (LGL) communication, and we demonstrate its efficacy by means of several illustrative examples.