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Towards an Operational Semantics for a Parallel Non-strict Functional Language

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Implementation of Functional Languages (IFL 1998)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1595))

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Abstract

Parallel programs must describe both computation and coordination, i.e. what to compute and how to organise the computation. In functional languages equational reasoning is often used to reason about computation. In contrast, there have been many different coordination constructs for functional languages, and far less work on reasoning about coordination.

We present an initial semantics for GpH, a small extension of the Haskell language, that allows us to reason about coordination. In particular we can reason about work, average parallelism and runtime. The semantics captures the notions of limited (physical) resources, the preservation of sharing, and speculative evaluation. We show a consistency result with Launchbury’s well-known lazy semantics.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Maths and Computing, The Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA

    Jon G. Hall & David J. King

  2. Department of Computer Science, Australian National University, Australia

    Clem Baker-Finch

  3. Department of Computing and Electrical Engineering, Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton, Edinburgh, EH14 4AS

    Phil Trinder

Authors
  1. Jon G. Hall
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  2. Clem Baker-Finch
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  3. Phil Trinder
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  4. David J. King
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, North Haugh, St Andrews, KY16 9SS, UK

    Kevin Hammond  & Tony Davie  & 

  2. Department of Computer Science, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK

    Chris Clack

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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Hall, J.G., Baker-Finch, C., Trinder, P., King, D.J. (1999). Towards an Operational Semantics for a Parallel Non-strict Functional Language. In: Hammond, K., Davie, T., Clack, C. (eds) Implementation of Functional Languages. IFL 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1595. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48515-5_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48515-5_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-66229-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48515-5

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