Message oriented programming—A resource based methodology

The development of new technology and hardware systems provides many new opportunities for their exploitation. These opportunities also present us with certain responsibilities—namely, to develop appropriate tools for the orderly and well founded management of these systems. In this report we present a methodology for the development (and analysis) of programs based on the structuring principle of processes which synchronize their activities by message passing. The basis of the methodology is the resource and this concept generalizes that of abstract data type to the message-passing environment. The methodology is a natural outgrowth of methodologies for sequential programs and parallel programs developed for shared address spaces. We illustrate our ideas via solutions to some well known problems such as the bounded buffer problem, the readers and writers problem, the dining philosophers problem and the unreliable medium problem.