ActorScript(TM):

Industrial strength integration of local and nonlocal concurrency for Client-cloud Computing

ActorScript™ is a general purpose programming language for implementing massive local and nonlocal concurrency. It is differentiated from other concurrent languages by the following:
* Identifiers (names) in the language are referentially transparent, i.e., in a given scope an identifier always refers to the same thing.
* Everything in the language is accomplished using message passing including the very definition of ActorScipt itself.
* Binary XML is fundamental, being used for structuring both data and messages.
* Functional and Logic Programming are integrated into general concurrent programming
* Advanced concurrency features such as futures, serializers, sponsors, etc. can be defined and implemented without having to resort to low level implementation mechanisms such as threads, tasks, locks, and cores.
* For ease of reading, programming can be displayed using a 2-dimensional textual typography (as is often done in mathematics).


This article is dedicated to Seymour Papert.

 PDF of full version of this article is available here.

 

Contents

 

Actor Model

Fundamental concepts.

Illustrations

Direct communication and asynchrony.

Locality and Security.

Privacy-friendly, client cloud computing.

Computational Representation Theorem

Comparison with other models of message-passing concurrency

ActorScript

Meta-circular Eval procedure in Lisp.

Eval as a Message.

Procedure invocations.

Control expressions.

Structural Expressions.

Compound Expressions.

Parallelism Expressions.

Functional Programming

Logic Programming.

Concurrent Programming.

Acknowledgment

Bibliography

Appendix: Historical Background

Petri nets

Simula

Smalltalk-72

Actors

Lambda calculus redux

Actor Semantics

Logic Programming

Proof Theory

Early Actor Programming languages

Machines

Pi-calculus

Was the Actor model premature?

End Notes

 

Comments

PDF download problem

Hi Carl,

I'd love to download the PDF versions of papers from your site, but am having problems: No file download takes place, just a new page opens. I'm on OS X. Please let us know what the problem is with the PDF downloads.

Thanks,

-- Frank Sommers

Last edited Jul 19, 2009 7:10 PM
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