[E-Lang] E FAQ

[Dan Moniz]

At 6:28 PM -0400 9/29/01, Jonathan A Rees wrote:
>To: markm@caplet.com
>Cc: e-lang@eros-os.org
>Subject: Re: [E-Lang] E FAQ
>From: Jonathan A Rees <jar8@mumble.net>
>Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2001 18:28:52 -0400
>
>    Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 22:22:00 -0700
>    From: "Mark S. Miller" <markm@caplet.com>
>
>    I believe all this applies equally well to Actors, Concurrent
>    Prolog, Joule, and Toontalk.  We need a name for this category.  If
>    partisans of these others don't mind, I propose "Actor-like", since
>    Hewitt did it first and almost perfectly.  What other language
>    paradigms are in this category?  How would one classify Erlang?
>    Mozart?
>
>What do you think of "pure concurrent" languages, by analogy with
>"pure functional"?

[snip]

>The funny thing is that there was never any particular thing called
>"actors".  There was the "actors model of computation," which I think
>was an informal notion, but no actors language, just Plasma, Act II,
>etc. (what others?).

FWIW, I'm for this, but I think we need to be clear what Actors are 
(and I think _we_ all are, but that other programmers are not). In 
the case of purely functional languages, there's no universally 
accepted definition, despite having the Lambda Calculus to point to.

Miscellaneous trivia: Microsoft had a (object-oriented) language 
called Actor in the mid/late eighties. Research I did way back 
suggested it had nothing to do with Hewitt's Actors.

>Is there anything on actors languages online, such as a history or
>overview?  And/or can you suggest a canonical reference that I might
>find at an MIT library?  I have a Plasma Primer (unpublished;
>photocopied from Sussman's personal copy), and I know about Gul Agha's
>book on Act II and the references in Henry's "Lieberary" (none
>available online), but "actors" always seems like a moving target and
>I don't know the best place to look for details.

I scoured what resources I could think of a while back, primarily 
CiteSeer <http://www.researchindex.com/>, MIT FTP sites, the Web at 
large, etc. Desperation led me to send the following to Hewitt 
<hewitt@ai.mit.edu> not too long ago:

At 9:16 AM -0400 9/8/01, Dan Moniz wrote:
>Dear Mr. Hewitt:
>
>I'm writing to inquire if you have a publicly available archive of 
>your papers, or know of any such archive. I'm involved in some 
>personal study and research on many topics which you have either 
>published the seminal work on, or have added significantly to the 
>field. This includes actor languages, theorem proving, and 
>concurrent systems. In a brief, but relatively deep search of 
>relevant sites on the Web, I was unable to find a number of your 
>older papers, and in most cases was only able to find references to 
>publications. It would be a huge boon to have an archive of your 
>work available, if it can be made public without breaking 
>publication and copyright agreements.
>
>Thank you for your time, and above all, thank you for your 
>contributions to computer science and artificial intelligence. I 
>look forward to your response and studying further work from you.

To date, I haven't received any response.


-- 
Dan Moniz <dnm@pobox.com> [http://www.pobox.com/~dnm/]