Task-oriented programming in a pure functional language

Task-Oriented Programming (TOP) is a novel programming paradigm for the construction of distributed systems where users work together on the internet. When multiple users collaborate, they need to interact with each other frequently. TOP supports the definition of tasks that react to the progress made by others. With TOP, complex multi-user interactions can be programmed in a declarative style just by defining the tasks that have to be accomplished, thus eliminating the need to worry about the implementation detail that commonly frustrates the development of applications for this domain. TOP builds on four core concepts: tasks that represent computations or work to do which have an observable value that may change over time, data sharing enabling tasks to observe each other while the work is in progress, generic type driven generation of user interaction, and special combinators for sequential and parallel task composition. The semantics of these core concepts is defined in this paper. As an example we present the iTask3 framework, which embeds TOP in the functional programming language Clean.

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