reinvocation

Reinvocation refers to the act of invoking something again—calling a function, method, procedure, or operation that has already been invoked previously. It may occur in the same execution or across process boundaries, and can be intentional or due to failure.

In programming, reinvocation often arises through retries after a failure or timeout, or when event handlers are re-entered. In functional style, repeated invocations may be produced by recursion or loop unrolling; in languages with tail call optimization, reinvocation can reduce to iterative steps.

In distributed systems, reinvocation commonly appears as retry semantics, message redelivery, or idempotent services that tolerate duplicate invocations. To manage reinvocation safely, systems may use idempotence keys, deduplication, or exactly-once processing where feasible.

Considerations include potential side effects, resource usage, ordering guarantees, and state handling. Designers may employ debouncing, backoff strategies, and idempotent interfaces to minimize unintended consequences of reinvocation.

See also: invocation, recursion, retry, idempotence, deduplication.