HIGHER-ORDER DISTRIBUTED OBJECTS

We describe a distributed implementation of Scheme that permits effici ent transmission of higher-order objects such as closures and continua tions. The integration of distributed communication facilities within a higher-order programming language engenders a number of new abstract ions and paradigms for distributed computing. Among these are user-spe cified load-balancing and migration policies for threads, incrementall y linked distributed computations, and parameterized client-server app lications. To our knowledge, this is the first distributed dialect of Scheme (or a related language) that addresses lightweight communicatio n abstractions for higher-order objects.