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SuperPascal
SuperPascal is an imperative, concurrent computing programming language developed by Per Brinch Hansen. It was designed as a publication language: a thinking tool to enable the clear and concise expression of concepts in parallel programming. This is in contrast with implementation languages which are often complicated with machine details and historical conventions. It was created to address the need at the time for a parallel publication language. Arguably, few languages today are expressive and concise enough to be used as thinking tools.
SuperPascal is based on Niklaus Wirth's sequential language Pascal, extending it with features for safe and efficient concurrency. Pascal itself was used heavily as a publication language in the 1970s. It was used to teach structured programming practices and featured in text books, for example, on compilers and programming languages. Hansen had earlier developed the language Concurrent Pascal, one of the earliest concurrent languages for the design of operating systems and real-time control systems.
The requirements of SuperPascal were based on the experience gained by Hansen over three years in developing a set of model parallel programs, which implemented methods for common problems in computer science. This experimentation allowed him to make the following conclusions about the future of scientific parallel computing:
These then led to the following requirements for a parallel publication language:
The key ideas in the design of SuperPascal was to provide a secure programming, with abstract concepts for parallelism.
SuperPascal is secure in that it should enable its compiler and runtime system to detect as many cases as possible in which the language concepts break down and produce meaningless results. SuperPascal imposes restrictions on the use of variables that enable a single-pass compiler to check that parallel processes are disjoint, even if the processes use procedures with global variables, eliminating time-dependent errors. Several features in Pascal were ambiguous or insecure and were omitted from SuperPascal, such as labels and goto statements, pointers and forward declarations.
The parallel features of SuperPascal are a subset of occam 2, with the added generality of dynamic process arrays and recursive parallel processes.
A parallel statement denotes that the fixed number of statements it contains must be executed in parallel. For example:
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SuperPascal AI simulator
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SuperPascal
SuperPascal is an imperative, concurrent computing programming language developed by Per Brinch Hansen. It was designed as a publication language: a thinking tool to enable the clear and concise expression of concepts in parallel programming. This is in contrast with implementation languages which are often complicated with machine details and historical conventions. It was created to address the need at the time for a parallel publication language. Arguably, few languages today are expressive and concise enough to be used as thinking tools.
SuperPascal is based on Niklaus Wirth's sequential language Pascal, extending it with features for safe and efficient concurrency. Pascal itself was used heavily as a publication language in the 1970s. It was used to teach structured programming practices and featured in text books, for example, on compilers and programming languages. Hansen had earlier developed the language Concurrent Pascal, one of the earliest concurrent languages for the design of operating systems and real-time control systems.
The requirements of SuperPascal were based on the experience gained by Hansen over three years in developing a set of model parallel programs, which implemented methods for common problems in computer science. This experimentation allowed him to make the following conclusions about the future of scientific parallel computing:
These then led to the following requirements for a parallel publication language:
The key ideas in the design of SuperPascal was to provide a secure programming, with abstract concepts for parallelism.
SuperPascal is secure in that it should enable its compiler and runtime system to detect as many cases as possible in which the language concepts break down and produce meaningless results. SuperPascal imposes restrictions on the use of variables that enable a single-pass compiler to check that parallel processes are disjoint, even if the processes use procedures with global variables, eliminating time-dependent errors. Several features in Pascal were ambiguous or insecure and were omitted from SuperPascal, such as labels and goto statements, pointers and forward declarations.
The parallel features of SuperPascal are a subset of occam 2, with the added generality of dynamic process arrays and recursive parallel processes.
A parallel statement denotes that the fixed number of statements it contains must be executed in parallel. For example: