Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!eos!shafto
From: shafto@eos.UUCP (Michael Shafto)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
Subject: Re: choosing parallel languages
Message-ID: <4566@eos.UUCP>
Date: 3 Aug 89 16:21:50 GMT
References: <8908011650.AA12679@kanga.cs.umass.edu.edu> <5726@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <275@oscsuna.osc.edu>
Reply-To: shafto@eos.UUCP (Michael Shafto)
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Calif.
Lines: 25



For those who are primarily interested in exploring the concepts of
CSP (rather than producing blazingly fast programs on parallel hardware),
I believe the Icon programming language is worth looking at.  It's public
domain, well supported, well documented, portable to many machines,
written in C; it supports more than the usual complement of datatypes;
it supports coroutines.  It is very easy to implement (i.e., model)
all CSP operators in Icon.  (I will provide some illustrative code on
request -- amateurish, but then it's so easy that amateurs can do it!)

Since Icon is implemented in C, it's essentially a high-level C.  C programmers
should find it very easy to learn, and it lives very happily 
(though not exclusively) in Unix environments.  It seems to me that
Icon should be readily adaptable to real parallel hardware, but
I'm not sure whether anyone has done it.

Mike

Refs --  The Icon Programming Language by Ralph & Madge Griswold,
Prentice-Hall; The Implementation of the Icon Programming 
Language, same authors, Princeton University Press; multo
tech reports available from the Icon Group, Department of
Computer Science, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
85721 USA