Glish's main purpose is to coordinate a number of processes that form a distributed system. These processes are instances of programs written in compiled languages such as C or C++.
Each program is written in an event-oriented style; the program's sole view of the rest of the system comes from events it receives, and its sole mechanism for communicating its state and results to the system is by generating more events. The programs have no knowledge of what other programs the system includes, or what is done with their results, or where received events came from. The event-oriented style lends itself to creating modular programs that you can connect together in powerful, unforeseen ways. You make these connections using Glish.
We deal with the details of how programs receive, interpret, and
generate events later in Chapter 13, page 
. In this chapter we
focus on manipulating events from within a Glish program.