An object-based approach to the specification of applications for office support systems

The design of a specification methodology for office systems is described. In particular, the authors discuss the desired properties of a computational model upon which a specification methodology for office systems should be based. An overview of ABSL, a specification language that they developed, is presented. The central concept in ABSL is an object which is the principal mechanism for representing the data and computations. The design of ABSL is based on the formal theory of the actor model. The actor model is chosen because not only it captures the abstract power of object-orientation paradigm, but provides as well a mathematically precise abstract machine for analysis of asynchronous and concurrent computations