Object Based Concurrent Computing

This book deals with a major theme of the Japanese Fifth Generation Project, which emphasizes logic programming, parallelism, and distributed systems. It presents a collection of tutorials and research papers on a new programming and design methodology in which the system to be constructed is modeled as a collection of abstract entities called "objects" and concurrent messages passing among objects. This methodology is particularly powerful in exploiting as well as harnessing the parallelism that is naturally found in problem domains. The book includes several proposals for programming languages that support this methodology, as well as the applications of object-oriented concurrent programming to such diverse areas as artificial intelligence, software engineering, music synthesis, office information systems, and system programming. It is the first compilation of research results in this rapidly emerging area. Contents:Concurrent Programming Using Actors. Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming in Act-1. Modelling and Programming in a Concurrent Object-Oriented Language, ABCL/1. Concurrent Programming in ConcurrentSmallTalk. Orient84K: An Object-Oriented Concurrent Programming Language for Knowledge Representation. POOL-T: A Parallel Object-Oriented Programming Language. Concurrent Strategy Execution in Omega. The Formes System: A Musical Application of Object-Oriented Concurrent Programming. Distributed Problem Solving in ABCL/1. The contributors are Gul Agha (MIT), Pierre America (Phillips Research Laboratory, Eindhoven), Giuseppe Attardi (DELPHI SpA), Jean Pierre Briot (IRCAM, Paris), Pierre Cointe (IRCAM, Paris), Carl Hewitt (MIT), Yutaka Ishikawa (Keio University), Henry Lieberman (MIT), Etsuya Shibayama (Tokyo Institute of Technology), Mario Tokoro (Keio University), Yasuhiko Yokote (Keio University), and Akinori Yonezawa (Tokyo Institute of Technology). Object-Oriented Concurrent Programmingis included in The MIT Press Series in Artificial Intelligence, edited by Patrick Henry Winston and Michael Brady.

The ECOOP '91 Workshop on Object-Based Concurrent Computing was organized toprovide a forum on concurrent, distributed and open-ended computing. The emphasis was on conceptual, theoretical and formal aspects, as well as practical aspects and sound experience, since such a viewpoint was deemed indispensible to investigate and establish a basis for future development. This volume contains 12 papers selected from 25 presented at the workshop, together with a paper by J.A. Goguen, who was an invited speaker at the workshop. The papers are classified into four categories: Formal methods (1): three papers are concerned with the formal semantics of concurrent objects based on process calculi. Formal methods (2): four papers are concerned with various formal approaches to the semantics of concurrent programs. Concurrent programming: three papers. Models: three papers areconcerned with models for concurrent systems.

Concurrent constraint programming (ccp) is a recent development in programming language design. Its central contribution is the notion of partial information provided by a shared constraint store. This constraint store serves as a communication medium between concurrent threads of control and as a vehicle for their synchronization. Objects for Concurrent Constraint Programming analyzes the possibility of supporting object-oriented programming in ccp. Starting from established approaches, the book covers various object models and discusses their properties. Small Oz, a sublanguage of the ccp language Oz, is used as a model language for this analysis. This book presents a general-purpose object system for Small Oz and describes its implementation and expressivity for concurrent computation. Objects for Concurrent Constraint Programming is written for programming language researchers with an interest in programming language aspects of concurrency, object-oriented programming, or constraint programming. Programming language implementors will benefit from the rigorous treatment of the efficient implementation of Small Oz. Oz programmers will get a first-hand view of the design decisions that lie behind the Oz object system.

Concurrency is a powerful technique for developing efficient and lightning- fast software. For instance, concurrency can be used in common applications such as online order processing to speed processing and ensure transaction reliability. However, mastering concurrency is one of the greatest challenges for both new and veteran programmers. Softwar

This book focuses on object-oriented concurrent computing, which can be considered a model of concurrent programming, and proposes a new programming language, ConcurrentSmalltalk, which is based on object-oriented concurrent computing. The book also shows the efficiency of object-oriented concurrent computing through the design, implementation, and evaluation of ConcurrentSmalltalk. ConcurrentSmalltalk is designed to be upwardly compatible with Smalltalk-80. In the book, the ConcurrentSmalltalk object model is first proposed. Next, issues which arise from maintaining compatibility with Smalltalk-80 are discussed. Finally, the ConcurrentSmalltalk virtual machine which executes the ConcurrentSmalltalk programs is proposed.

Software -- Programming Languages.

This book provides an overview of the new paradigm through the programming language ABCL.

Concurrent C is a superset of C that provides parallel programming facilities such as those for the declaring and creating processes, for process synchronization and interaction, and for process termination and abortion. Concurrent C was designed for the effective utilization of multiprocessors and multicomputers. Concurrent C, as a compile-time option, also works with C++, an object-oriented superset of C.