Report B 97-14
December 1997
This paper aims at classifying and discussing the various ways
along which the object paradigm is used for concurrent systems.
We distinguish the library approach,
the integrative approach and the reflective approach.
The library approach applies object-oriented concepts, as they are,
to structure concurrent systems through libraries.
The integrative approach consists in merging concepts such as
object and activity, message passing and transaction.
The reflective approach closely integrates protocol libraries
and object-oriented languages.
We discuss and illustrate each of these approaches and
point out their complementary levels and goals.
We will also make a careful distinction between the notions of
concurrency on the one hand - referring to the non-sequential
semantics of a program - and parallelism and distribution
on the other hand - referring to the actual implementation of a
concurrent system.
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