Logic Based and Imperative Coordination Languages

This paper deals with the cooperation between programming systems that belong to diierent paradigms. We explain our approach towards coordination in the context of the recently proposed notions of mega-programming and coordination languages. We show how our logic based parallel language V P L (Vienna Parallel Logic) can be decomposed into a computation and a coordination part. The language constructs necessary for the coordination of autonomous software systems include a highly abstract communication mechanism, an advanced transaction model and concurrency. The coordination part is generalized so that it can be embedded into programming languages of diier-ent paradigms, for example into imperative languages. This concept resembles the Linda approach in many aspects and we compare the two. A main diierence is that instead of adding orthogonal constructs that are in no way related to the host language, we embed coordination into the language so the result is a new language that does not change the programming style of the underlying host language.