Abstract

Abstract: Every day, electronic equipments become cheaper and smaller than the day before. At the same time, computer networks cover larger and larger areas of the planet. Combining these two technological improvements is giving birth to new application fields that we call `Diffuse Computing`. However developing the innovative applications made possible by this new infrastructure is currently challenging. First, because they are new and yet difficult to imagine. Second, because from a computer scientist perspective, suitable tools are lacking. To help face this problem, we have conceived the HOP programming language whose syntax and semantics are specially crafted for programming distributed diffuse applications. HOP is built on top of standard Web technologies, which it uses as the components of a virtual machine. This provides HOP with several assets such as portability, availability, and versatility. Albeit crafted for the web and compatible most technologies, HOP is also a functional language belonging to the Lisp family. The language and its semantics will be detailed in this presentation. It`s implementation will be sketched and the programming style it fosters presented.