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The emerging trend in writing distributed applications is to use an object-based RPC system with a statically compiled, object-oriented language. While such a programming environment is adequate for many tasks, object-based RPC systems and statically compiled languages also have certain intrinsic limitations. These limitations become significant when writing applications which are both distributed and interactive (e.g. network information browsers, distributed conferencing systems and collaborative work tools). This paper discusses these limitations, and presents the design of Phantom, a new intepreted language for distributed programming. Phantom provides many features found in object-based RPC systems and statically compiled languages, including automatic marshalling, transparent remote procedure call, secure authentication and concurrency support. In addition to these traditional features, Phantom's interpreted nature permits the use of certain programming techniques, such as true object migration, remote evaluation, and dynamic extensibility, which are of increasing importance for distributed programming, but which are not available in statically compiled languages and RPC systems. The integration of these features in a single, coherent programming language makes whole new classes of distributed, interactive applications possible.