The Active Object System

An Extended Concept of Object Types

Active Oberon for .NET propagates a “new computing model” [3] that is based on a dynamic population of communicating active objects or agents. The corresponding language construct is an upgraded variant of an object type declaration with an optional body for the specification of intrinsic behavior. By convention, the body of an object type is run automatically as a separate thread as a side effect of the creation of an instance.

Ordinary (passive) objects are considered as active objects with an empty intrinsic behavior. They often take the role of shared resources. Figure H.1 depicts the new computing model. It shows a collection of self-managing objects. Some objects (like x and ...

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