The Actor programming language was invented by Charles Duff of The

Whitewater Group Whitewater Group is an Object-oriented software company in the United States. It was acquired by Symantec on June 9, 1992, for US$3.28 million. Products * Whitewater Resource Editor for Windows (OEMed to Borland which later replaced it ...

in 1988. It was an offshoot of some object-oriented extensions to the

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language he had been working on. Actor is a pure object-oriented language in the style of

Smalltalk Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...

. Like Smalltalk, everything is an object, including small integers. A

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semi-space

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is used, along with (in memory-constrained Windows 2.1 days) a software virtual memory system that swaps objects. A token threaded interpreter, written in 16-bit

x86 assembly language x86 assembly language is the name for the family of assembly languages which provide some level of backward compatibility with CPUs back to the Intel 8008 microprocessor, which was launched in April 1972. It is used to produce object code for t ...

, 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. A demo of Actor was shown in an episode of

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References

{{Authority control Smalltalk programming language family Object-oriented programming languages Programming tools for Windows

Further reading

References