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From: sakkinen@jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: searching for active objects
Message-ID: <1991May9.135348.25065@jyu.fi>
Date: 9 May 91 13:53:48 GMT
References: <2167@kgw2.XETRON.COM>
Reply-To: sakkinen@jytko.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen)
Organization: University of Jyvaskyla, Finland
Lines: 38

In article <2167@kgw2.XETRON.COM> dennisg@Xetron.COM writes:
>being a multi-threaded kind of guy, i recently did some active object
>work under Mach on the NeXT computer using c++.
>
>what other languages and where can i find them that support 
      ^^^^^ 1
>active objects?  i'm looking for things like Actor.
                                              ^^^^^ 2

(1) Huh?  C++ does not support active objects;  but there are many
extensions that do, each of them in a different way.
For instance, one extension presented in the literature by
P.A. Buhr et al. mimicked Ada's task types.
There are a number of OO languages that have been originally
designed for concurrency.

(2) Obviously Hewitt and Agha's actor languages are meant here,
not The Whitewater Group's Smalltalk-like language that has been
confusingly named 'Actor'.

The book, "Object-Oriented Concurrent Programming", edited by
Yonezawa and Tokoro (MIT Press 1987), contains articles
on many different languages and systems.  Recommended.
(Recommendations on more recent _books_ in the area are solicited.)

After reading the most relevant chapters of the above book, continue
by looking in the proceedings of both OOP and parallel-programming
conferences.  Last autumn's OOPSLA/ECOOP had two ordinary sessions
on concurrency;  also a panel discussion and a two-day workshop,
but what was presented there is not in the proceedings.

Markku Sakkinen
Department of Computer Science and Information Systems
University of Jyvaskyla (a's with umlauts)
PL 35
SF-40351 Jyvaskyla (umlauts again)
Finland
          SAKKINEN@FINJYU.bitnet (alternative network address)