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Towards a theory of actor computation

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  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
CONCUR '92 (CONCUR 1992)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 630))

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Abstract

In this paper we present preliminary results of a rigorous development of the actor model of computation. We present an actor language which is an extension of a simple functional language, and provide a precise operational semantics for this extension. Our actor systems are open distributed systems, meaning we explicitly take into account the interface with external components in the specification of an actor system. We define and study various notions of equivalence on actor expressions and systems. We show that the usual tripartite family of testing equivalence relations collapses to two in the presence of fairness. We define a notion of operational bisimulation as a tool for establishing equivalence under fairness assumptions, and illustrate its use.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinois, USA

    Gul Agha

  2. Stanford University, USA

    Ian A. Mason

  3. Johns Hopkins University, USA

    Scott Smith

  4. Stanford University, USA

    Carolyn Talcott

Authors
  1. Gul Agha
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  2. Ian A. Mason
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  3. Scott Smith
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  4. Carolyn Talcott
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Editor information

W.R. Cleaveland

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© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Agha, G., Mason, I.A., Smith, S., Talcott, C. (1992). Towards a theory of actor computation. In: Cleaveland, W. (eds) CONCUR '92. CONCUR 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 630. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg . https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0084816

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0084816

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-55822-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47293-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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