Actor (programming language)

The Actor programming language was invented by Charles Duff of The Whitewater Group in 1988. It was an offshoot of some object-oriented extensions to the Forth language he had been working on.

Actor is a pure object-oriented language in the style of Smalltalk. Like Smalltalk, everything is an object, including small integers. A Baker semi-space garbage collector is used, along with (in memory-constrained Windows 2.1 days) a software virtual memory system that swaps objects. A token threaded interpreter,[1] written in 16-bit x86 assembly language, executes compiled code.

Actor only was released for Microsoft Windows 2.1 and 3.0. Actor used a pure object-oriented framework over native operating system calls as its basic GUI architecture. This allows an Actor application to look and feel exactly like a Windows application written in C, but with all the advantages of an interactive Smalltalk-like development environment. Both a downside and upside to this architecture is a tight coupling to the Windows architecture, with a thin abstraction layer into objects. This allows direct use of the rich Windows OS API, but also makes it nearly impossible to support any other OS without a significant rewrite of the application framework.

Further reading
gollark: Hmm. Interesting. I don't know if OpenGL can do 4D.
gollark: UTILIZE the vim cube.
gollark: https://github.com/oakes/vim_cubed
gollark: o
gollark: It's not like fixing buses/cars is very useful anyway. I mean, sure, there are quite a lot of instances when buses or cars may need fixing, but tons of people can do that and to some extent you can probably get away with looking it up on the internet on demand; meanwhile, assembly programmng is a rare and hard to learn skill.

References
  1. Inc, InfoWorld Media Group (1991-02-25). InfoWorld. InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.
  2. Don Crabs (15 October 1990). "Actor offers a sophisticated OOP development system". InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.: 86–. ISSN 0199-6649. Retrieved 18 August 2011. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
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