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Facile: A symmetric integration of concurrent and functional programming

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Abstract

Facile is a symmetric integration of concurrent and functional programming. The language supports both function and process abstraction. Functions may be defined and used within processes, and processes can be dynamically created during expression evaluation. In this work we present two different descriptions of the operational semantics of Facile. First, we develop a structural operational semantics for a small core subset of Facile using a labeled transition system. Such a semantics is useful for reasoning about the operational behavior of Facile programs. We then provide an abstract model of implementation for Facile: theConcurrent and Functional Abstract Machine (C-FAM). The C-FAM executes concurrent processes evaluating functional expressions. The implementation semantics includes compilation rules from Facile to C-FAM instructions and execution rules for the abstract machine. This level of semantic description is suitable for those interested in implementations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, The State University of New York at Stony Brook, 11794-4400, Stony Brook, New York

    Alessandro Giacalone, Prateek Mishra & Sanjiva Prasad

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  1. Alessandro Giacalone
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  2. Prateek Mishra
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  3. Sanjiva Prasad
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Additional information

This work has been partially supported by NSF CCR-8704309 and NSF CCR-8706973.

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Giacalone, A., Mishra, P. & Prasad, S. Facile: A symmetric integration of concurrent and functional programming. Int J Parallel Prog 18, 121–160 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01491213

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