Using Scoping Rules as a Distributed Coordination Language

Keywords: coordination languages, Scheme, distributed systems, lexical scoping, distributed objects. Essential to coordinating a distributed application is organizing and traversing the distributed application graph. Lexical scoping performs this function among modern high-level programming languages, but does not have the same distinction in distributed programming systems, where it competes with various forms of associative and object-oriented binding. We will show that distributed lexical scop-ing, combined with closures, provides a powerful means of coordinating communication in distributed computations and can significantly reduce the complexity for developing certain types of applications visa -vis other coordination paradigms/languages. These results are not dependent on a particular programming language, and can be combined with existing paradigms.