Fundamental Concepts
The Actor model adopts the philosophy that everything is an actor. This is similar to the everything is an object philosophy used by some object-oriented programming languages, but differs in that object-oriented software is typically executed sequentially, while the Actor model is inherently concurrent.
An actor is a computational entity that, in response to a message it receives, can concurrently:
- send a finite number of messages to other actors;
- create a finite number of new actors;
- designate the behavior to be used for the next message it receives.
There is no assumed sequence to the above actions and they could be carried out in parallel.
Decoupling the sender from communications sent was a fundamental advance of the Actor model enabling asynchronous communication and control structures as patterns of passing messages.
Recipients of messages are identified by address, sometimes called "mailing address". Thus an actor can only communicate with actors whose addresses it has. It can obtain those from a message it receives, or if the address is for an actor it has itself created.
The Actor model is characterized by inherent concurrency of computation within and among actors, dynamic creation of actors, inclusion of actor addresses in messages, and interaction only through direct asynchronous message passing with no restriction on message arrival order.
Read more about this topic: Actor Model
Famous quotes containing the words fundamental and/or concepts:
“The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favor of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)