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17.2.8 ``In Large'' Extensibility Model

 

MOVIE 1.0 will represent the minimal closed design of the MOVIE server, defined as the uniform object-oriented interpreted interface to all Open Systems resources defined in Section 17.2.1. Such a model can then be further expanded both at the system level (i.e., by adding new emerging standards or by creating and promoting new standard candidates) and at the application level (i.e., by building MOVIE based application packages).

Two basic structural entities used in the extension process are types and shells. Typically, types for the system extensions and shells are used for building MOVIE applications. In fact, however, both type- and shell-based extensibility models, as well as system and application level extensions, can be mixed within ``in large'' programming paradigms.

Both type- and shell-based extensions can be implemented at the compiled or interpreted level. At the current stage, the compiled extensibility level is fully open for MOVIE developers. The detailed user-level extensibility model will be specified starting from MOVIE 1.0. Explicit user access to the C code server resources will be restricted and the dominant extension mode will be provided at the interpreted MovieScript level. The C/Fortran-based user-level extensions as well as the extensibility via the third party software will be supported in the encapsulated, ``coarse-grain'' modular form similar to the AVS/Explorer model (see Section 17.2.7).

The type extension model is based on the inheritance forest and it was discussed in Section 17.2.3. The shell extension model utilizes PostScript-style extensibility and is described below.

Structurally, a MovieScript shell is an instance of the shell type. Its special functional role stems from the fact that it provides mechanisms for extending the system dictionary by new types and the associated polymorphic operators. In consequence, types and shells are in a dual relationship-examples would be nodes and links in a network or nouns and verbs in a sentence. In a simple physical analogy, types play the role of particles, i.e. some elementary entities in the computational domain and shells provide interactions between particles. In conventional object-oriented models, objects-that is, particles-are the only structural entities and the interactions are to be constructed as special kind of objects. The organization in MOVIE is similar at the formal structural level since MovieScript shells are instances of the MovieScript type, but there is functional distinction between object-based and shell-based programming. The former is following the message-passing-based C++ syntax and can be visualized as ``particle in external field'' type interaction. The latter follows the dataflow-based  PostScript syntax and can be visualized as multiparticle processes such as scattering, creation, annihilation, decay, fusion and so on.

An appealing high-level language design model can be constructed by iterating the dual relation between types and shells in the multiscale fashion. Composite types of generation N+1 are constructed in terms of interactions involving types and shells of generation N. The ultimate structural component, that is, the system-wide type dictionary, is expected to be rich and diverse to match the complexity of the ``real world'' computational problems. The ultimate functional component, that is, some very high level language defined by the associated shells is expected to be simple, polymorphic and easy to use (``common English''), with all complexity hidden in methods for specialized types (``expert English'').

In our particle physics analogy, this organization could be associated with the real-space renormalization group techniques. New composite types play the role of new collective variables at larger spatial scale, polymorphic operators correspond to the scale-invariant interaction vertices, and MovieScript shells contribute new effective interaction terms. Good high-level language design corresponds to the critical region, in which the number of effective ``relevant'' interactions stabilizes with increasing system size. Our conjecture is that natural languages can be viewed as such fixed points in some grammar space, and hence the best we can do to control computational complexity is to evolve in a similar direction when designing high-level computer languages.



next up previous contents index
Next: 17.2.9 CASE Tools Up: 17.2 System Overview Previous: Integration



Guy Robinson
Wed Mar 1 10:19:35 EST 1995