ylfink@water.waterloo.edu (ylfink) (01/21/89)
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES SEMINAR
- Tuesday, January 24, 1989
Prof. Piotr Findeisen from the Institute of
Informatics, Warsaw University, Poland, visiting the
University of Alberta, will speak on ``Implementing
LOGLAN - an object oriented language for parallel
computations''.
TIME: 3:30 PM
ROOM: DC 1304
ABSTRACT
The growing demand for object-oriented languages and
parallel computations led in the late seventieth to the
development of a new programming language, called
Loglan. Loglan is based on Simula-67, the language
which introduced the notions of classes and prefixing.
The basic features provided by Loglan are: programmed
allocation and deallocation of objects, multi-level
prefixing, coroutines and parallel processing.
The allocation and deallocation of objects creates some
problems for the implementors of Loglan. However, the
first version of the compiler (but for a sequential
subset of the language) was ready by the end of 1981.
The next few years were spent debugging the compiler
and designing the kernel for a new operating system,
which was intended to allow for the execution of
multi-process programs. The experiments with the new
kernel were conducted on a two-processor minicomputer.
Although the kernel itself appeared to be running well,
it turned out that it was extremally difficult to make
an efficient implementation of the run-time system for
concurrent Loglan without appropriate hardware support.
In 1983 the team had an opportunity of participating in
a project aimed at the design of a new minicomputer.
The resulting design took into account the experience
gained by the team and contained some hardware
primitives for parallel Loglan programs.
Unfortunately, the design was abandoned and none of the
computers were made.