Arche(ID:7129/arc006)

Successor to Polygoth at INRIA Rennes
Related languages
POLYGOTH => Arche   Successor
References:
  • Benveniste, M. and Issarny, V. "ARCHE : un langage parallele a objets fortement types" RR-1646 Mars 1992 view details Abstract: Arche is the Polygoth language successor, designed in the "Langages et Systemes Paralleles" team at IRISA as the result of a first effort towards understanding concurrent object-oriented programming. The design of Polygoth was aimed ate the explicit management of both data and computation distributio- n and replication. A novel approach for integrating parallelism and objetcs was proposed, although it proves to be poor as far as synchronization, inheritance and exception handling are concerned. The Arche object is simpler and closer to those of the scandinavian school languages. This simple object model allows for a satisfactory integration of the mechanisms that both the object-oriented approach and the explicit management of concurrency require. Among Arche main aspects, the following novelties can be pointed out : integration of concurrency, inheritance and abstract types in an imperative and strongly-typed language - generalization of the method call to a sequence of objetcs - introduction of an exception handling mechanism that handles nested parallelism. The first part of this report presents the multiprocedure concept and its integration in the Polygoth language and shows the drawbacks mentioned above. The second part describes the main aspects of Arche. The notions of object, type and class are initially defined, then parallelism, inheritance and sub-typing and exception handling are presented in three separate chapters.