Actor Model
Hewitt's work on the Actor model of computation has spanned over 30 years, beginning with the introduction of the model in a 1973 paper authored by Hewitt, Peter Bishop, and Richard Steiger, and including new results on Actor model semantics published as recently as 2006. Much of this work was carried out in collaboration with students in Hewitt's Message Passing Semantics Group at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Sussman and Steele developed the Scheme programming language in an effort to gain a better understanding of the Actor model. However, their Scheme interpreter was not capable of fully implementing the Actor model because Actor customers cannot be implemented as lambda calculus continuations and Actors can change their local state in a way that is impossible in the lambda calculus A number of programming languages were developed to specifically implement the Actor model, such as ACT-1, SALSA, Caltrop, E and ActorScript. The Actor model also influenced the development of the π-calculus. (See Actor model and process calculi history.)
Read more about this topic: Carl Hewitt, Research
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