[comp.parallel] Parallel Object Oriented Programming

thomson@cs.utah.edu (Rich Thomson) (05/27/88)

[ Sorry about the large number of groups in the Newgroups: line, but I'm trying
  to reach a large audience of initial viewers in the hopes of getting some
  kind of response. ]

    I'm interested in gathering information about parallel implementations of
object oriented programming systems where objects may communicate across
processors.  I will post a summary to comp.parallel if there is enough response
to warrant it.

    I've been tossing the idea around of building a distributed object oriented
system on top of FORTH.  The idea would be to extend FORTH to an object
oriented approach by modifying the vocabulary and dictionary search mechanisms.
Objects would then communicate by message passing, generalized to message
passing to a different processing node if the object did not reside on the
current node.

    I haven't seen anything in the literature that's passed my way about such
a system, but then again, I don't carefully peruse the parallel literature.
Any article references, personal anecdotes, or general information would be
appreciated.

				Thanks in advance,
					Rich
-- 
Rich Thomson, Oasis Technologies, 3190 MEB, U of U, Salt Lake City, Utah  84112
(801) 584-4555  thomson@cs.utah.edu  {bellcore,ihnp4,ut-sally}!utah-cs!thomson
			Science: the modern mythology

smryan@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Steven Ryan) (05/30/88)

Some object-oriented-ish programming languages, referred to as Actor systems,
are specifically designed for parallel processing. There is a book on actors
by Agha which includes further references.

Whether actors are OOPS is debatable.

                      Hafa an godne daege.
                                   sm ryan

gasser%pollux.usc.edu@oberon.USC.EDU (Les Gasser) (06/01/88)

See the book OBJECT ORIENTED CONCURRENT PROGRAMMING by A. Yonezawa and
M. Tokoro, MIT Press, 1986, and also the two proceedings of the OOPSLA
conferences which contain several articles on languages such as POOL,
ABCL/1, and ORIENT84/K. Also Gul Agha is organizing a workshop on
object-oriented distributed programming systems, in San Diego, I
believe, later this year. The book on Actors is Gul Agha, ACTORS, MIT
Press, 1986. You might also check out A. Bond and L. Gasser,
READINGS IN DISTRIBUTED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, to be published
by Morgan Kaufman later this summer, as well as Mike Huhns, ed.
DISTRIBUTED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, Pitman/Morgan Kaufman, 1987.

fpst@hubcap.UUCP (Steve Stevenson) (06/01/88)

Take a look, for example, at NeWS, the window imaging model from
Sun Microsystems.  This is a multitasking, dictionary based, object oriented,
forth-flavored (Postscript) language with class inheritance for
window/tool management and design. FYI.

-- jack
Spoken: Jack Callahan		ARPA:   callahan@mimsy
CSNet:  callahan@umcp-cs	UUCP:   {seismo,allegra}!umcp-cs!callahan
XNSIP:	callahan:Computer Science:UofMaryland
"A cute and witty disclaimer"
-- 
Steve Stevenson                            fpst@hubcap.clemson.edu
(aka D. E. Stevenson),                     fpst@clemson.csnet
Department of Computer Science,            comp.parallel
Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634-1906 (803)656-5880.mabell