Actor Languages Their Syntax, Semantics, Translation, and Equivalence

In this paper we present two actor languages and a semantics preserving translation between them. The source of the translation is a high-level language that provides object-based programming abstractions. The target is a simple functional language extended with basic primitives for actor computation. The semantics preserved is the interaction semantics of actor systems—sets of possible interactions of a system with its environment. The proof itself is of interest since it demonstrates a methodology based on the actor theory framework for reasoning about correctness of transformations and translations of actor programs and languages and more generally of concurrent object languages.