No label defined (Q4028513)

[For the entire collection see Zbl 0747.00036.] We introduce an object-based language to formally specify the externally observable behavior of office objects as well as their computations. Object-based approach, as embodied in several languages, has proven to be a useful principle of software organization. Our proposed language is called ABSL and is based on Carl Hewitt's actor theory. The actor theory is chosen because not only it captures the abstract power of object- orientation paradigm, but provides as well a mathematically precise abstract machine for analysis of asynchronous and concurrent computations. The central concepts in ABSL are objects and message passing. Every entity, whether abstract or concrete, that is relevant to some office computation is conceptually viewed and modeled as an object. Computations among the objects are uniformly modeled as patterns of message passing. An example is provided to show the expressiveness of specifications in ABSL.