From: FREDERICK C. FOWLER
Subject: Concurrent Lisps
Date:
Message-ID: <5077@pyr.gatech.EDU>
I am looking for information about some of the extensions to LISP that have
been devised for parallel processing. I've already gotten quite a number of
responses when I posted a question about MultiScheme in the scheme newsgroup;
now I'd like to know what references I can use to learn about QLAMBDA, CLISP,
PARLISP, Concurrent Common LISP, and any other concurrent extension to LISP.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Fred Fowler
Room 414, Centennial Research Bldg
Georgia Inst. of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332
In article <····@pyr.gatech.EDU>, ······@pyr (FREDERICK C. FOWLER) writes:
>
> I am looking for information about some of the extensions to LISP that have
>been devised for parallel processing. I've already gotten quite a number of
>responses when I posted a question about MultiScheme in the scheme newsgroup;
>now I'd like to know what references I can use to learn about QLAMBDA, CLISP,
>PARLISP, Concurrent Common LISP, and any other concurrent extension to LISP.
"Qlambda" has been officially renamed to Qlisp and work is in progress
here in implementing it on an Alliant FX/8 and testing applications in
the area of symbolic computation (a la Macsyma). The best available
description of the language is a chapter by Dick Gabriel and John
McCarthy in "Parallel Computation and Computers for Artificial
Intelligence", edited by Janusz S. Kowalik (Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1988). This book also discusses several other parallel AI
languages and architectures. Unfortunately it is rather expensive
($58.95 at the Stanford bookstore).
--
--
Joe Weening Internet: ···@SAIL.Stanford.EDU
Computer Science Dept. BITNET: ·····················@Stanford
Stanford University UUCP: {decwrl,uunet}!SAIL.Stanford.EDU!JSW
In article <····@pyr.gatech.EDU>, ······@pyr.gatech.EDU (FREDERICK C. FOWLER) writes:
>
> I am looking for information about some of the extensions to LISP that have
>been devised for parallel processing. I've already gotten quite a number of
>responses when I posted a question about MultiScheme in the scheme newsgroup;
>now I'd like to know what references I can use to learn about QLAMBDA, CLISP,
>PARLISP, Concurrent Common LISP, and any other concurrent extension to LISP.
>
I do not know if it used to be called something else, but Multilisp is
certainly another language you want to know about. It was designed by
Robert Halstead at MIT, and it is based on the nice-and-easy idea of
"futures" (e.g. a future is a placeholder for any Lisp expression that is
evaluated in parallel).
The language was described in the October 1985 issue of the ACM Transactions
on Programming Languages and Systems and I believe also in the same book that
was cited in a previous post on Qlisp.
Implementations exist for the Concert multiprocessor (an MIT prototype) and
other commercial multiprocessors such as the Encore Multimax, Vax 82xx 88xx,
as well as uniprocessors like Suns, Vaxen, IBM-RT. There is also a
simulator for a Lisp machine.
Alessandro Forin Internet: ··@speech2.cs.cmu.edu
Computer Science Dept. BITNET: ·············@cmccvma
Carnegie-Mellon University UUCP: {decwrl,uunet}!cs.cmu.edu!af