A concurrency mechanism for sequential Eiffel
Murat Karaorman, John L. Bruno · 1992
This paper describes a set of classes designed to facilitate concurrent programming using the sequential object-oriented language EIFFEL. The design and implementation presented here is the application of a more general Concurrency Model we have built to introduce concurrency to sequential OOPLs. The model views concurrency as a well-defined, inheritable property of objects specified in the class CONCURRENCY, and provides a methodology using inheritance to write concurrent object-orient applications. Key ideas involved in the methodology are: active objects, extensibility of protocols, synchronization programming, data-driven synchronization with asynchronous message passing. The novel feature of our work is in its describing concurrency in the context of sequential programming and using a object-oriented design methodology to describe and implement it. We illustrate the usefulness and expressiveness of the concurrency mechanism by presenting examples and analyzing them. The ability t...