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##### 8.1.4.1 Overview of Pragma Remote_Call_Interface

Library units categorized with this pragma declare subprograms that can be called and executed remotely. An RCI unit acts as a server for remote calls. There is no memory space shared between server and clients. A subprogram call that invokes one such subprogram is a classical RPC operation; it is a statically bound operation, because the compiler can determine the identity of the subprogram being called.

Dynamically bound calls are provided through two mechanisms:

- The dereference of an access-to-subprogram value, i.e. a value whose type is a remote access-to-subprogram (RAS).
- A dispatching call whose controlling argument is an access-to-class-wide operand. The formal is a remote access-to-class-wide (RACW) type. These remote access types can be declared in RCI packages as well.

A remote access type (RAS or RACW) can be viewed as a fat pointer, that is to say a structure with a remote address and a local address (like an URL: `<protocol>`://`<remote``-``machine>`/`<local``-``directory>`). The remote address must denote the host of the partition on which the entity has been created; the local address describes the local memory address within the host.

It is very unlikely that RCI units can be duplicated in the distributed system. An implementation may allow separate copies of a RCI unit as long as it ensures that the copies present a consistent state to all clients. In the general case, preserving consistency is very costly. For this reason, the implementation may require a RCI unit to be unique in the distributed system.