Abstract
This paper reviews the state of the art in building and reasoning about concurrent system using actors. We first provide a brief definition of actors and discuss the status of actor theory. We then describe a number of programming abstractions that are useful in developing and maintaining complex concurrent systems. Defining such abstractions requires a sort of system decomposition that is not supported by standard models of concurrency, including actors and nets. Rather a suitable meta-architecture is needed and its satisfactory formal definition remains elusive. We currently have only rudimentary semantics for the different programming abstractions that we have developed.
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Agha, G.A. (1996). Modeling concurrent systems: Actors, nets, and the problem of abstraction and composition. In: Billington, J., Reisig, W. (eds) Application and Theory of Petri Nets 1996. ICATPN 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1091. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61363-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61363-3_1
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