Executing functional programs on a virtual tree of processors
F. Warren Burton, M. Ronan Sleep · 1981
A wide variety of computational models, including the lambda calculus, may be represented by a set of reduction rules which guide the (run-time) construction of a process tree. Even a single source of parallelism in an otherwise lazy evaluator may give rise to an exponential growth in the process tree, which must eventually overwhelm any finite architecture.