New mechanisms for invocation handling in concurrent programming languages

Invocation handling mechanism in many concurrent languages have significant limitations that make it difficult or costly to solve common programming situations encountered in program visualization, debugging, and scheduling scenarios. This paper discusses these limitations, introduces new language mechanisms aimed at remedying these limitations, and presents an implementation of the new mechanisms. The examples are given in SR; the new mechanisms and implementation are an extension of SR and its implementation. However, these new mechanisms are applicable to other concurrent languages. They can augment or replace current invocation handling mechanisms. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.