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Actor (programming language)
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<p>The Actor programming language was invented by Charles Duff of The <a href="/facts/Whitewater_Group/utH1cgfE">Whitewater Group</a> in 1988. It was an offshoot of some object-oriented extensions to the <a href="/facts/Forth_/mYtWVNhF">Forth</a> language he had been working on. </p><p>Actor is a pure object-oriented language in the style of <a href="/facts/Smalltalk/Ru2UPVDE">Smalltalk</a>. Like Smalltalk, everything is an object, including small integers. A <a href="/facts/Henry_Baker_(computer_scientist)/wMhr7heA">Baker</a> semi-space <a href="/facts/Garbage_collection_(computer_science)/j2vlIu7g">garbage collector</a> is used, along with (in memory-constrained Windows 2.1 days) a software virtual memory system that swaps objects. A token threaded <a href="/facts/Interpreted_language/JB85fbyb">interpreter</a>, written in 16-bit <a href="/facts/X86_assembly_language/GTUtvkMm">x86 assembly language</a>, executes compiled code. </p><p>Actor only was released for Microsoft Windows 2.1 and 3.0. Actor used a pure object-oriented framework over native operating system calls as its basic GUI architecture. This allows an Actor application to look and feel exactly like a Windows application written in C, but with all the advantages of an interactive Smalltalk-like development environment. Both a downside and upside to this architecture is a tight coupling to the Windows architecture, with a thin abstraction layer into objects. This allows direct use of the rich Windows OS API, but also makes it nearly impossible to support any other OS without a significant rewrite of the application framework. </p><p>A demo of Actor was shown in an episode of <a href="/facts/Computer_Chronicles/XugX51My">Computer Chronicles</a>. </p>