Concurrent constraint programming (ccp) is a recent development in programming language design. Its central contribution is the notion of partial information provided by a shared constraint store. This constraint store serves as a communication medium between concurrent threads of control and as a vehicle for their synchronization. Objects for Concurrent Constraint Programming analyzes the possibility of supporting object-oriented programming in ccp. Starting from established approaches, the book covers various object models and discusses their properties. Small Oz, a sublanguage of the ccp language Oz, is used as a model language for this analysis. This book presents a general-purpose object system for Small Oz and describes its implementation and expressivity for concurrent computation. Objects for Concurrent Constraint Programming is written for programming language researchers with an interest in programming language aspects of concurrency, object-oriented programming, or constraint programming. Programming language implementors will benefit from the rigorous treatment of the efficient implementation of Small Oz. Oz programmers will get a first-hand view of the design decisions that lie behind the Oz object system.

This book is concerned with the architecture and implementation of constraint engines. The author's main contribution is that constraint services, such as search and combinators, are made programmable; this is achieved by devising computation spaces as simple abstractions for programming constraint services at a high level. State-of-the-art and novel search strategies such as visual interactive search and parallel search are covered. This book is indispensable reading for anyone seriously interested in constraint technology.

Concurrent constraint programming (ccp) is a recent development in programming language design. Its central contribution is the notion of partial information provided by a shared constraint store. This constraint store serves as a communication medium between concurrent threads of control and as a vehicle for their synchronization. Objects for Concurrent Constraint Programming analyzes the possibility of supporting object-oriented programming in ccp. Starting from established approaches, the book covers various object models and discusses their properties. Small Oz, a sublanguage of the ccp language Oz, is used as a model language for this analysis. This book presents a general-purpose object system for Small Oz and describes its implementation and expressivity for concurrent computation. Objects for Concurrent Constraint Programming is written for programming language researchers with an interest in programming language aspects of concurrency, object-oriented programming, or constraint programming. Programming language implementors will benefit from the rigorous treatment of the efficient implementation of Small Oz. Oz programmers will get a first-hand view of the design decisions that lie behind the Oz object system.

This book deals with a major theme of the Japanese Fifth Generation Project, which emphasizes logic programming, parallelism, and distributed systems. It presents a collection of tutorials and research papers on a new programming and design methodology in which the system to be constructed is modeled as a collection of abstract entities called "objects" and concurrent messages passing among objects. This methodology is particularly powerful in exploiting as well as harnessing the parallelism that is naturally found in problem domains. The book includes several proposals for programming languages that support this methodology, as well as the applications of object-oriented concurrent programming to such diverse areas as artificial intelligence, software engineering, music synthesis, office information systems, and system programming. It is the first compilation of research results in this rapidly emerging area. Contents:Concurrent Programming Using Actors. Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming in Act-1. Modelling and Programming in a Concurrent Object-Oriented Language, ABCL/1. Concurrent Programming in ConcurrentSmallTalk. Orient84K: An Object-Oriented Concurrent Programming Language for Knowledge Representation. POOL-T: A Parallel Object-Oriented Programming Language. Concurrent Strategy Execution in Omega. The Formes System: A Musical Application of Object-Oriented Concurrent Programming. Distributed Problem Solving in ABCL/1. The contributors are Gul Agha (MIT), Pierre America (Phillips Research Laboratory, Eindhoven), Giuseppe Attardi (DELPHI SpA), Jean Pierre Briot (IRCAM, Paris), Pierre Cointe (IRCAM, Paris), Carl Hewitt (MIT), Yutaka Ishikawa (Keio University), Henry Lieberman (MIT), Etsuya Shibayama (Tokyo Institute of Technology), Mario Tokoro (Keio University), Yasuhiko Yokote (Keio University), and Akinori Yonezawa (Tokyo Institute of Technology). Object-Oriented Concurrent Programmingis included in The MIT Press Series in Artificial Intelligence, edited by Patrick Henry Winston and Michael Brady.

This book describes the benefits that emerge when the fields of constraint programming and concurrency meet. On the one hand, constraints can be used in concurrency theory to increase the conciseness and the expressive power of concurrent languages from a pragmatic point of view. On the other hand, problems modeled by using constraints can be solved faster and more efficiently using a concurrent system. Both directions are explored providing two separate lines of development. Firstly the expressive power of a concurrent language is studied, namely Constraint Handling Rules, that supports constraints as a primitive construct. The features of this language which make it Turing powerful are shown. Then a framework is proposed to solve constraint problems that is intended to be deployed on a concurrent system. For the development of this framework the concurrent language Jolie following the Service Oriented paradigm is used. Based on this experience, an extension to Service Oriented Languages is also proposed in order to overcome some of their limitations and to improve the development of concurrent applications.