I've seen it mentioned in several places in contexts like Erlang actor model, Groovy actors, Scala actor model etc. What does this refer to?
+1
A:
I think Wikipedia sums it up best:
The Actor model adopts the philosophy that everything is an actor. This is similar to the everything is an object philosophy used by some object-oriented programming languages, but differs in that object-oriented software is typically executed sequentially, while the Actor model is inherently concurrent. [snip] The Actor model is about the semantics of message passing.
Andrew Hare
2009-03-21 13:44:27