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.