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Language Support for Declarative Future Commitments

Sequential programming and work-flow programming are two useful, but radically different, ways of describing computational processing. Of the two, it is sequential programming that we teach all programmers and support by programming languages, whether in procedural, objectoriented, or functional paradigms. We teach workflow as a secondary style of problem decomposition for use in special situations, like distributed or networked processing. Both styles offer complementary advantages, but the fact that they employ radically different models for ownership of continuations interferes with our ability to integrate them in a way that allows them to be taught and used in a single programming language. This paper describes a programming language construct, declarative future commitments, that permit better integration of the two.