Actalk: A Testbed for Classifying and Designing Actor Languages in the Smalltalk-80 Environment.
Jean-Pierre Briot · 1989
This paper describes a system for designing and classifying actor languages. This system, named Actalk, which stands for actors in Smalltalk-80, is based on some minimal kernel introducing actors into Smalltalk-80. The Actalk kernel extends passive and sequential objects activated by synchronous message passing into active and concurrent actors communicating by asynchronous message passing. This defines a sub-world of actors embedded into the Smalltalk80 programming language and environment, which is left unchanged. The Actalk kernel is composed of only two Smalltalk-80 classes. Simulating current actor languages or designing new ones is achieved by defining subclasses of these two kernel classes. Consequently all such extensions are implicitly classified by the inheritance mechanism and unified into the Actalk environment. We are currently extending the standard Smalltalk-80 programming environment to design a specific one dedicated to Actalk concurrent actors. In this paper, the moti...