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The link above is to a pretty general paper on agents - it was referenced on the agents mailing list along with the following:
[...]the main point is that OO programming has nothing to say about who has access to the methods of an object apart from in terms of setting a global private/public distinction. Woolridge et al suggest that in AO programming the designer should be forced to think in terms of a messaging interface between agents, such that any accessing of a method should be subject to security constraints. The point being that while you can do this in OO, you are not required to, in the way that you can create objects in a nonOO language, but are not required to do so. An AO language would try to pressure developers into providing higher level interfaces, and thus move the locus of control away from the method being accessed, and towards making the agent a self-contained entity that checks who is making a request before acting upon it. This whole approach is supposed to be suited to environments where lots of different people from different organisations have built the components, rather than where one might have lots of different objects built by a group of people that we assume is trying to co-operate (a software engineering effort of a number of programmers).
(email from Sam Joseph). There was no further discussion on the list, but I thought the idea of an AO language intriguing.
Posted to "" by andrew cooke on 8/28/00; 12:46:06 AM
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Agent Oriented Programming
