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Strong types for coordinating active objects
Author(s) -
Puntigam Franz
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
concurrency and computation: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.309
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1532-0634
pISSN - 1532-0626
DOI - 10.1002/cpe.570
Subject(s) - asynchronous communication , computer science , object (grammar) , set (abstract data type) , type (biology) , simple (philosophy) , distributed computing , process (computing) , method , computation , programming language , theoretical computer science , object oriented programming , artificial intelligence , computer network , ecology , philosophy , epistemology , biology
Abstract An object type is usually regarded as a contract between an object and each of its clients. However, in concurrent (and sometimes also in sequential) systems it is more useful to regard a type as a contract between an object and the set of all clients: when the object acts as a shared resource, the clients must be coordinated before sending messages to the object. Process types of active objects specify constraints on the ordering of messages. Static type checking ensures proper coordination of clients so that objects receive messages only in acceptable orderings. As presented in this article, the process type system is based on a simple computation model where active objects communicate via asynchronous message passing. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.