SPEAKER: Uwe Nestmann, BRICS, Aalborg University
DATE: Friday, 7 May 1999
PLACE and TIME: Room E3-209 at 14:00.
ABSTRACT: In Obliq, a lexically scoped, distributed, object-based programming language, object migration was suggested as creating a (remote) copy of an object's state at the target site, followed by turning the (local) object itself into an alias, also called surrogate, for the just created remote copy. There is no proof that object migration in Obliq is safe in any sense.
We consider the creation of object surrogates as an abstraction of the above-mentioned style of migration. We introduce ?Øjeblik, a distribution-free subset of Obliq, and provide an intuitive configuration-style semantics. Based on it, we motivate why surrogation is neither safe in Obliq, nor can it be so in full generality in Repliq, our proposal of a repaired Obliq. We briefly sketch how to prove a positive result for Repliq using a semantics by translation into pi-calculus, and argue why it suffices for practical purposes.