Prototyping Programming Environments for Object-Oriented Concurrent Languages: a Smalltalk-Based Experience Lo c LESCAUDRON

This paper discusses the prototyping of programming environments for object-oriented concurrent programming languages. We advocate designing new prototypes starting from existing sophisticated programming environments that we can nd in standard (sequential) object-oriented programming languages (namely Smalltalk-80 1 ). Our starting point is a testbed for object-oriented concurrent languages based on Smalltalk80. This system (namely Actalk) focuses on actor-based languages and gives a good integration of actors into the Smalltalk-80 system. We naturally came to reuse the standard Smalltalk-80 programming environment tools and to customize them to the speci cities of actors. In this paper, we describe why and how we customize the Model View Controller architecture to provide user-interfaces on actors, and the scheduler to simulate concurrent execution of actors. Other tools such as stepper and chronogram are also discussed. We then summarize our experience in building and using this prototype programming environment to prospect future programming environments for object-based concurrent systems.