Actors with Multi-Headed Message Receive Patterns

Martin Sulzmann, Edmund Soon Lee Lam, Peter Van Weert

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    Abstract

    The actor model provides high-level concurrency abstractions to coordinate simultaneous computations by message passing. Languages implementing the actor model such as Erlang commonly only support single-headed pattern matching over received messages. We propose and design an extension of Erlang style actors with receive clauses containing multi-headed message patterns. Patterns may be non-linear and constrained by guards. We provide a number of examples to show the usefulness of the extension. We also explore the design space for multi-headed message matching semantics, for example first-match and rule priority-match semantics. The various semantics are inspired by the multi-set constraint matching semantics found in Constraint Handling Rules. This provides us with a formal model to study actors with multi-headed message receive patterns. The system can be implemented efficiently and we have built a prototype as a library-extension to Haskell.
    OriginalsprogEngelsk
    BogserieLecture Notes in Computer Science
    Sider (fra-til)315-330
    ISSN0302-9743
    StatusUdgivet - 2008
    Begivenhed10th international conference on Coordination Models and Languages (Coordination'08) - Oslo, Norge
    Varighed: 4 jun. 20086 jun. 2008
    Konferencens nummer: 10

    Konference

    Konference10th international conference on Coordination Models and Languages (Coordination'08)
    Nummer10
    Land/OmrådeNorge
    ByOslo
    Periode04/06/200806/06/2008

    Emneord

    • Actor model
    • Concurrency
    • Message passing
    • Pattern matching
    • Multi-headed patterns

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