Supporting Agent Systems in the Programming Language

Agent-oriented methodologies emphasize organisational concepts, which give structure to large agent systems. Organisational frameworks, however, put an extra burden on developers, who need to master both an agent-oriented programming language and the framework itself. We believe that the organisation of agent systems should be directly supported by features of the programming language. In this paper we propose three such language features: algebraic data types, roles, and sessions. They are inspired by functional programming languages and by session types. How they fit together in the context of agent-oriented programming is new.