CONCURRENT PROCESSING IN OBJECT ORIENTED PARALLEL AND NEAR PARALLEL SYSTEMS

In sequential object oriented languages such as C++, a mechanism is provided to permit multiple asynchronous processing operations without compiler modifications, language extensions or special pre-processing. A specially adapted pointer converts a procedure call into an asynchronous task thread, while returning an expected response to permit a calling program to continue processing. The returned value can be either discarded or converted to a future variable if the calling program requires the result of the separate processing on the asynchronous thread. The invention can be used in parallel multi-processors environments and in uni-processors having parallel processing characteristics.