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International Workshop on Programming Multi-Agent Systems

ProMAS 2007: Programming Multi-Agent Systems pp 140–155Cite as

Adding Structure to Agent Programming Languages

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4908))

Abstract

There is a huge gap between agent programming languages used for industrial applications and those developed in academia. While the former are mostly extensions of mainstream programming languages (e.g. Java), the latter are often very specialized languages, based on reactive rules. These specialized languages enjoy clear semantics and come with a number of knowledge representation features, but lack important aspects such as code re-use, modularity, encapsulation etc.

We present a method to extend the syntax of existing specialized agent oriented programming languages to allow more efficient hierarchical structuring of agent programs. We illustrate our method through a simple language based on reactive rules. We then gradually extend the core language by several higher level syntactic constructs, thus improving the support for source code modularity and readability.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, Clausthal University of Technology, Germany

    Peter Novák & Jürgen Dix

Authors
  1. Peter Novák
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  2. Jürgen Dix
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Editor information

Mehdi Dastani Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni Alessandro Ricci Michael Winikoff

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Novák, P., Dix, J. (2008). Adding Structure to Agent Programming Languages. In: Dastani, M., El Fallah Seghrouchni, A., Ricci, A., Winikoff, M. (eds) Programming Multi-Agent Systems. ProMAS 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4908. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79043-3_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79043-3_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-79042-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-79043-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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