Mastering Functional Programming

Context and references

Apart from the callbacks that give you control over how an actor reacts to various life cycle events, an actor has an API for managing the context of its execution:

Actors have references to the ActorRef of themselves and the sender actor. These references are supposed to be accessed from the receive method. Through them, you can interact with the sender actor, as well as with this actor as with ActorRefs. This means that you can send messages to these actors, and do other things you would usually do as an external observer.

Aside from references, an actor has a context reference that provides information and control ...