Ellie language definition report

ABSTRACT

This report defines the parallel object-oriented language Ellie in details by means of informal definitions and examples. The syntax of Ellie is defined by a grammar. Ellie has been designed as a part of my Ph.D. thesis.The goals of Ellie are to achieve machine independent parallel programming and great language flexibility. Machine independent parallel programming is achieved by allowing the programmer to have a huge number of small processes for a virtual distributed memory parallel computer. If an actual distributed parallel computer can not execute the huge number of processes efficiently then a compiler can combine small processes hereby reducing the number of processes.Great language flexibility is achieved by allowing definitions of new types and control structures and by using a non-strict type system. Ellie is meant as an all-purpose programming language that has the flexibility of languages like Smalltalk and Lisp without losing efficiency in numerical calculations etc.

REFERENCES

• 1: Gul Agha , Carl Hewitt, Actors: a conceptual foundation for concurrent object-oriented programming, Research directions in object-oriented programming, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987
• 2: [Andersen 90] Birger Andersen. Grain-Size Adaption in the Flexible Fine-Grained Object-Oriented Language Ellie. PhD thesis (partial), Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, 1990. In preparation.
• 3: W. C. Athas, Fine grain concurrent computations, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, 1987
• 4: Andrew Black , Norman Hutchinson , Eric Jul , Henry Levy , Larry Carter, Distrbution and Abstract Types in Emerald, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.13 n.1, p.65-76, January 1987 [doi>10.1109/TSE.1987.232836]
• 5: [Brinch Hansen 75] Per Brinch Hansen. The programming language Concurrent Pascal. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 1(2):199-207, June 1975.
• 6: Per Brinch Hansen, The architecture of concurrent programs, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1977
• 7: P. B. Hansen, Joyce—a programming language for distributed systems, Software—Practice & Experience, v.17 n.1, p.29-50, Jan. 1987 [doi>10.1002/spe.4380170105]
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• 9: Adele Goldberg , David Robson, Smalltalk-80: the language and its implementation, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1983
• 10: N. C. Hutchinson, EMERALD: An object-based language for distributed programming, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 1987
• 11: [Hutchinson 87b] Norman C. Hutchinson, Rajendra K. Raj, Andrew P. Black, Henry M. Levy, and Eric Jul. The Emerald Programming Language. DIKU Report no. 87/22, Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, October 1987. Also Technical Report 87-10-07, Department of Computer Science, University of Washington.
• 12: [IEEE 85] IEEE. Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic. IEEE Standard 754, IEEE, New York, 1985.
• 13: Bent Bruun Kristensen , Ole Lehrmann Madsen , Birger Moller-Pedersen , Kristen Nygaard, The BETA programming language, Research directions in object-oriented programming, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987
• 14: Ole Lehrmann Madsen, Block-structure and object-oriented languages, Research directions in object-oriented programming, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987
• 15: Etsuya Shibayama , Akinori Yonezawa, Distributed computing in ABCL/1, Object-oriented concurrent programming, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987
• 16: Yasuhiko Yokote , Mario Tokoro, The design and implementation of Concurrent Smalltalk, Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications, p.331-340, September 29-October 02, 1986, Portland, Oregon, United States

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES

  F. Theory of Computation
  F.1 COMPUTATION BY ABSTRACT DEVICES
      F.1.2 Modes of Computation
          Subjects: Parallelism and concurrency

General Terms:
Documentation, Languages