An overview of actor languages

Abstract

Actors are computational agents which carry out their actions in response to incoming communications. As in other object-oriented languages, actors encapsulate procedural and declarative information into a single entity. Primitive actor languages are based on a pure message-passing semantics. Higher-level actor languages incorporate the use of inheritance for conceptual organization and delegation for structuring the sharing of code between different actors. This paper provides an overview of the actor model and discusses some advantages of actor languages in exploiting large-scale concurrent architectures. The kernel of an actor language is presented and some of the higher-level control constructs are discussed.