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 Programming is included in The MIT Press Series in Artificial Intelligence, edited by Patrick Henry Winston and Michael Brady.