Re: Designing a language for dataflow/parallelism

tony@tonyRobinson.com wrote:
> Out of idle curiosity (and for my own education) I'm kicking about the
> idea of designing and implementing a very simple programming language.
>
> One of the objectives is a "safe" language with good optimisation and
> for that I've decided that there will be no explicit pointers (e.g. as
> Java).
...
> There's clearly a tradeoff between expressiveness of the language and
> ability to optimise. Googling on "alias analysis" and "automatic
> scoping" gets me somewhere, for example the "why C can't be as fast as
> Fortran" debate, which is educational. However I'm really interested in
> the idea of a new language (or portable assembler, c-- style), so I'm
> looking for references, papers, projects on this sort of problem, more
> comparative analysis of different languages, or even just the right
> keywords to hit google with...


You might also want to check out Sisal, a dataflow parallel functional
language that was intended to be an alternative to the prevailing
imperative serial languages that were extended to support parallelism.
Although Sisal is dead now, it's of interest because the language
differed significantly from the standard fare and because the project
was more than just an academic exercise.


Sisal tutorial:
http://www2.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~jrwg/Sisal/


Sisal "homepage":
http://www.physics.nmt.edu/~raymond/software/sisal/sisal.html


Sisal mini-FAQ
http://www.physics.nmt.edu/~raymond/software/sisal/oldsisal/mini-faq.html


SISAL: A Safe and Efficient Language for Numerical Calculations
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4383


The Sisal Project: Real World Functional Programming
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/browne/cs392cf2001/papers/Sisal.pdf


Evaluating the Performance of a SISAL implementation of the Abingdon
Cross Image Processing Benchmark
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~davida/papers/abingdon.ps.Z


The Sisal Model of Functional Programming and its Implementation
http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/AISPAS.1997.581640


        Randy


--
Randy Crawford http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~rand rand AT rice DOT edu

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