Abstract

Our objective is to construct a Run-time System for Erasmus. Software systems
nowadays are becoming very complex, so the last thing a programmer would want to do is to worry about the internal management of communication. We describe a system that provides Erasmus with a well-defined level of abstraction. This run-time system also provides processes with independence, which means that no two processes know each others' location. Erasmus is a process oriented concurrent programming language being developed by Peter Grogono at Concordia University and Brian Shearing at The Software Factory in England. Erasmus is based mainly on cells, processes, and their interactions through message passing. For every cell there will be a manager to initiate the communication and also to route the communication, whether it is local or remote. Programmers should only be deciding which kind of data they want to send and the rest will be taken care by the run-time system. For communication within a cell, channels with local communication methods will be used; for communication over the network or on different processors, a broker with
remote communication methods will complete the communication link. There is also a separate protocol for a manager process to decide between local and remote communication. This thesis discusses in detail the issues related to process independence. It also explains how processes can be separated from the communication protocols. This run-time system will provide software of greater simplicity and fewer irrelevant details.