Hi Hans --

Check out David Reed's MIT thesis from the late 70s. There is a kind 
of "temporal algebra" that is used for dealing with complex 
coordination and "relative synching" of "object proxies" (and this is 
used in Croquet, etc.).

Cheers,

Alan

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At 4:09 PM +0100 11/15/03, Hans Nikolaus Beck wrote:
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>Hi,
>Am 15.11.2003 um 16:01 schrieb Alan Kay:
>
>>Thanks Marcus --
>>
>>These are both good observations.
>>
>>This is why I thought having objects be actively looking for 
>>messages was a good idea, and I really agree with why Linda is a 
>>nice model (perhaps having the matchers be associated with active 
>>objects is even nicer). In the early implementations of ST there 
>>just didn't seem to be enough computing power (and brain power in 
>>our heads) to make some of the 60s ideas (e.g. Dave Fisher's 
>>notions about control structures as transmuted to objects) work in 
>>a practical manner. Gelernter's later Linda ideas are quite 
>>suggestive. David Reed's ideas in his thesis and Croquet are also 
>>very suggestive of what more modern object models might be like. 
>>BTW, they include the notion of continuous rather than discrete 
>>time (as did the first Simula), and that processes are really more 
>>like mathematical entities that are approximated "behind the 
>>curtain".
>
>Has anyone already described something like  'algebra of processes' 
>on mathemtical level ?
>
>greetings
>
>
>Hans
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