GOODS to Appear on the Stage

The lecture will trace the development of some important object-oriented concepts and point out the analogy between performances at the stage of a theatre and the operation of information systems (and program executions). This metaphor will be used in a description of the ideas pursued and developed in the GOODS Project (General Object-Oriented Distributed Systems), a three year project supported by The Norwegian Research Council, starting January 1997. GOODS aims at extending the framework of object-oriented programming to include a multi-layered approach to the organisation of the relationship between people, computer hardware, organisational rules and programs in general distributed systems. GOODS also aims at introducing general tools for specifying visibilities of objects (scopes) and the precise dealing with the identities of objects that exist in many versions in a distributed environment.