2021-08-13 19:51:11 +00:00
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# What is an Actor?
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A [Syndicated Actor][Actor] is a collection of stateful
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[Entities][Entity], organised in a tree of [Facets][Facet], with each
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facet representing a
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[(sub)conversation](https://syndicate-lang.org/about/#conversational-concurrency-1)
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that the Actor is engaged in. Each entity belongs to exactly one
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facet; each facet has exactly one parent and zero or more children;
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each actor has exactly one associated root facet. When a facet is its
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actor's root facet, its parent is the actor itself; otherwise, its
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parent is always another facet.
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In the taxonomy of De Koster *et al.* ([2016](#DeKoster2016)), the
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Syndicated Actor model is a *Communicating Event-Loop* actor model,
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similar to that offered by the E programming language
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([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(programming_language));
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[erights.org](http://erights.org/)).
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2021-08-27 13:31:18 +00:00
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- [Actor], [ActorRef], [Facet], [FacetRef], [ActorState], [Mailbox],
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[Activation]
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**References.**
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- De Koster, Joeri, Tom Van Cutsem, and Wolfgang De Meuter. <a
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name="DeKoster2016">“43 Years of Actors: A Taxonomy of Actor Models
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and Their Key Properties.”</a> In Proc. AGERE, 31–40. Amsterdam,
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The Netherlands, 2016.
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[DOI](https://doi.org/10.1145/3001886.3001890).
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[PDF](http://soft.vub.ac.be/Publications/2016/vub-soft-tr-16-11.pdf).
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