Argus (programming language)

Argus is a programming language created at MIT by Barbara Liskov between 1982 and 1988, working with Maurice Herlihy, Paul Johnson, Robert Scheifler and William Weihl. It extends CLU, an earlier language of Liskov's, reusing most of CLU's syntax and semantics, and was designed specifically to support building distributed programs. Argus introduces guardians, objects that encapsulate related procedures and the data they protect and that can survive independently across a distributed system, and actions, atomic operations that let a distributed program's steps either complete fully or have no effect, giving Argus programmers a structured way to handle the partial failures that are common when a program's parts run on separate, unreliable machines.