[E-Lang] E FAQ

[Vijay Saraswat]

I thought we used to refer to Hewitt's AIJ paper (1974?) on patterns of
control expressed through message passing as the seminal paper on actors.

When I spent time on this about ten years ago, I never was able to find a
good Actors language.. the authors always seemed to be interested in the
next big idea and never had time to write down a complete language
definition.

Talking about language definitions, it might be good to get a Scheme-like
language definition document going for E...

Actor[s]-like/style seems fine to me...

(Need to unpack my bibliography files!)

Jonathan A Rees wrote:

>    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"?
>
> I'd prefer "actors-like" or "Actors-like" or "actorsish" to
> "actor-like", since we're not talking about things that are like an
> actor, but rather things that are like an actors-something (language
> or model).
>
> Or we could be more aggressive and say "actors-based".
>
> 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?).
>
> 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  I have a Plasma Primer (unpublished;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.
>
> Jonathan
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