ActorScript is based on a mathematical model of computation that
treats “ as the universal primitivesof concurrent digital
computation [Hewitt, Bishop, andSteiger 1973; Hewitt 1977].
Actors been used both as aframework for a theoretical
understanding of concurrency,and as the theoretical basis for
several practicalimplementations of concurrent systems.Unlike
previous models of computation, the Actor modelwas inspired by
physical laws. It was also influenced bythe programming
languages Lisp [McCarthy 1962],Simula[Dahl and Nygaard 1967] and
Smalltalk-72 [Kay1975], as well as ideas for Petri Nets [Petri
1962],capability-based systems [Dennis and van Horn 1966]
andpacket switching [Baran 1964]. Its development was motivated
by the prospect of highly parallel computingmachines consisting
of dozens, hundreds or even thousandsof independent
microprocessors, each with its own localmemory and
communications processor, communicatingvia a high-performance
communications network [Clinger 1981] Since that time, the
advent