Technical Report: DCC-97-5
An Abstract Machine for an Object Calculus
Luís Lopes, Vasco T. Vasconcelos
Departamento de Ciência de Computadores & LIACC
Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade do Porto
Rua do Campo Alegre, 823 4150 Porto, Portugal
July 1997
Abstract
We present an abstract machine specification for
TyCO (Typed Concurrent Objects), a name-passing calculus
that aims at capturing fundamental concepts present in
Concurrent Object-Oriented Languages.
TyCO has built-in labeled messages and ephemeral object
s that communicate asynchronously. Persistent objects
are supported through instantiation of recursive classes.
Concurrency is pervasive and synchronous communication
can be implemented by passing continuations in messages.
Strong, static typing is provided by a type inference
algorithm that supports a form of predicative polymorphism.
This paper describes the abstract machine framework in detail,
including how it evolves from TyCO and some important properties
it can be shown to possess.
Keywords: Object-Oriented, Concurrency, Language,
Implementation.