Language Overview A Maisie program is a collection of entity definitions and C functions. An entity instance, henceforth referred to simply as an entity, represents a specific object in the physical system and may be created and destroyed dynamically. An entity is created by the execution of a new statement and is automatically assigned a unique identifier on creation. For instance, the following statement creates a new instance of a manager entity and stores its identifier in variable r1 .
Entities communicate with each other using buffered message-passing.
Maisie defines a type called message , which is used to define the types of messages that may be received by an entity. Every entity is associated with a unique message-buffer. A message is deposited in the message buffer of an entity by executing an invoke statement. An entity accepts messages from its message-buffer by executing a wait statement. If tc is omitted, it is set to an arbitrarily large value.