Argus is a programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

 created at MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

 by Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov is a computer scientist. She is currently the Ford Professor of Engineering in the MIT School of Engineering's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department and an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.-Life and career:She earned her BA in...

 between 1982 and 1988, in collaboration with Maurice Herlihy

Maurice Herlihy

Maurice Herlihy is a computer scientist active in the field of multiprocessor synchronization. Herlihy has contributed to the design of concurrent algorithms, and in particular to the exposition and quantification of the properties and uses of hardware synchronization operations...

, Paul Johnson, Robert Scheifler

Bob Scheifler

Robert William Scheifler is an American computer scientist. He is most notable for leading the development of the X Window System from the project's inception in 1984 until the closure of the MIT X Consortium in 1996...

, and William Weihl. It is an extension of the CLU language, and utilizes most of the same syntax and semantics

Formal semantics of programming languages

In programming language theory, semantics is the field concerned with the rigorous mathematical study of the meaning of programming languages and models of computation...

. Argus was designed to support the creation of distributed programs, by encapsulating

Encapsulation (object-oriented programming)

In a programming language encapsulation is used to refer to one of two related but distinct notions, and sometimes to the combination thereof:* A language mechanism for restricting access to some of the object's components....

 related procedures within objects

Object (computer science)

In computer science, an object is any entity that can be manipulated by the commands of a programming language, such as a value, variable, function, or data structure...

 called guardians, and by supporting atomic operations called actions.