A family of languages (not a specific language) based on the
ActorsModel.
Some of these languages are described by
GulAgha in
Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems (The Mit Press Series in Artificial Intelligence) ISBN 0-262-01092-5.
Actors are objects that change role and send messages to mailboxes instead of directly to each other. They are a very elegant distributed programming concept.
Some discussion of the actors model that was here previously has been moved to
ActorsModel.
SteveDekorte maintains a list of actor languages at
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20060615012035/http://www.dekorte.com/docs/actors/
PlasmaLanguage and
ActLanguage (Act 1, 2 and 3) are the original actor languages designed at MIT by
CarlHewitt et al.
SalsaLanguage is an actor dialect of
JavaLanguage.
EeLanguage is an actor language that focusses on the security benefits of the actors model.
GeraldSussman and
GuySteele's attempt to understand
CarlHewitt's
ActorsModel resulted in the creation of the
SchemeLanguage. A language based on Scheme that is even closer to the pure actors model is
DoubleYouSeven.
Sussman and Steele arguably got continuations wrong; continuations in the actor model do not have the security problems that caused them to be omitted from DoubleYouSeven. In particular, Scheme continuations can return more than once to code that is unprepared for this. In the actor model, OTOH, an actor can
be written to respond a continuation more than once, but that would have to be explicitly programmed. Also note that actor continuations are a derived concept, whereas in implementations of Scheme they have to be supported as a primitive.
CalLanguage (also called Caltrop)
(not really... but it uses the word 'actor' to describe DataflowProgramming units.)
IoLanguage (but not
OriginalIoLanguage, which despite being based on continuations is sequential).
ErlangLanguage (Erlang processes correspond approximately to actors, although in the current implementations port/process IDs can be forged).
The
ActorFoundry is a Java implementation of actors.
ToonTalk is an actors-based
GraphicalProgrammingLanguage.
JoCaml is based on the
JoinCalculus, which is equivalent to actors.
CeeOmega is also based on the
JoinCalculus.
PictLanguage is based on a variant of the
PiCalculus. The differences between this variant and the usual
PiCalculus make it much closer to actors.
ActorProlog see
http://www.cplire.ru/Lab144/start/e_intro.html
AcTalk is a Smalltalk library (available for Squeak) the implements an Actors workbenck.
Not the same as the circa 1990 Whitewater Group Win16 pascal-like OO programming language
ActorLanguage.
Also see
CommunicatingSequentialProcesses,
JoinCalculus,
PiCalculus,
ObjectCapabilityLanguage.