What a Parallel Programming Language Has to Let You Say
Alan Bawden, Philip E. Agre · Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) · 1984
We have implemented in simulation a prototype language for the Connection Machine called CLI. CLi is an extrapolation of serial machine programming language technology: in CLl one programs the individual processors to perform local computations and talk to the communications network. We present details of the largest of our experiments with CLl, an interpreter for Scheme (a dialect of Lisp) that allows a large number of different Scheme programs to be run in parallel on the otherwise SIMD Connection Machine. Our aim was not to propose Scheme as a language for Connection Machine programming, but to gain experience using CLl to implement an interesting and familiar algorithm. Consideration of the difficulties we encountered led us to the conclusion that CLl programs do not capture enough of the casual structure of the processes they describe. Starting from this observation, we have designed a successor language called CGL (for Connection Graph Language).