Toward Languages and Formal Systems for Distributed Computing
Authors
Mario Tokoro and Kazunori Takashio
Book Title
Proceedings of ECOOP Workshop on OBDP (OBDP'93) (To be appeared)
Abstract
In this paper, we attempt to reveal the most essential properties of
distributed computations. We discuss that the notions of asynchrony,
real-time, and autonomy are vitally important to the widely
distributed, open-ended, ever-changing environment. We then propose a
programming language, called DROL, for asynchronous real-time
computing. It supports self-contained active objects that have threads
of control and a clock, and introduces the notion of timed invocation,
that guarantees the survivability of each active object. We place DROL
as a first step in constructing programming languages to realize the
above three notions. We also classify distributed computation into
four forms according to asynchrony and real-time properties, and try
to develop formalisms for the four categories based on a process
calculus. The formalisms allow us to describe and analyze both
globally and locally temporal properties as well as the behavioral
properties of distributed objects and the interactions among them. We
discuss issues remaining to be solved and suggest some possibilities
for future work.