Ambient-oriented programming

Abstract

A new field in distributed computing, called Ambient In-telligence, has emerged as a consequence of the increasing availability of wireless devices and the mobile networks they induce. Developing software for such mobile networks is extremely hard in conventional programming languages because the network is dynamically defined. This hardware phenomenon leads us to postulate a suite of characteristics of future Ambient-Oriented Programming languages. A simple re ective programming language kernel, called AmbientTalk, that meets these characteristics is subsequently presented. The power of the re ective kernel is illustrated by using it to conceive a collection of high level tentative ambient-oriented programming language features.