Ambient-Oriented Programming

AmbientTalk is a distributed programming language especially geared towards developing applications deployed on mobile networks. The language is a combination based on the actor programing paradigm and prototype-based programming.

AmbientTalk was originally built as a distributed extension on the Pic% language. Pic% is a prototype-based object-oriented extension of the language Pico. Both languages were originally developed in an educational and research context. Pico borrowed many of its design principles and concepts from the language Scheme. The foremost design concern of Pico was indeed building a simple and extensible language based upon simple rules.

Despite of keeping Pico's spirit in mind, AmbientTalk differs from Pic% in some profound ways being the most significant that AmbientTalk is a true object-oriented language where everything one can manipulate is an object. The integration of concurrency and distributed aspects was also a main concern in the design of AmbientTalk's object model. The concurrent and distribution model of AmbientTalk are inspired by the model of ABCL/1 and E.

This tutorial introduces the programming language AmbientTalk from the basics up to the distribution model. The tutorial does not attempt to be a comprehensive reference manual but a hands-on experience to get familiar with the main features of the language and able to read and write AmbientTalk programs.