EBG is a lazy functional programming language that compiles to the Java Virtual Machine Language. The aims of EBG are to provide the benefits of both FP and Java. This paper describes the design and implementation of agents in EBG that provides an interface to the underlying multi-processing facilities of Java. 1 Introduction EBG [Cla99a] is a higher-order lazy functional programming language that compiles to the Java Virtual Machine [Ven98]. EBG aims to provide all of the advantages of FP including pattern matching, first class functions and automatic type checking [Fie89], in addition to the advantages of Java [Arn98] including portability, multi-processing, networking and graphical user interfaces. This paper describes the design and implementation of agents in EBG. Agents provide an EBG-level interface to the multi-processing facilities of Java and are a step on the path to a longer term goal of providing programming facilities for functional multi-agent systems [Jen98]. Age...

Agents are autonomous system components that communicate using message passing. This paper presents a higher-order agent calculus and its implementation in the lazy functional programming language EBG. The calculus is given a semantics using a translation to the -calculus that encodes higherorder functions and normal order evaluation. 1 Introduction There is increasing demand for distributed software that is able to work collaboratively. The components of such a system are often referred to as agents [Jen98]. Each agent works autonomously but is able to communicate with other agents by passing messages containing data of arbitrary complexity. An agent is similar to a conventional program in that most of its computation is sequential and can be described using existing models. Agents differ from conventional computation with respect to inter-agent communication mechanisms. Messages may be sent asynchronously and are buffered in a queue by the receiver until they are processed. An...