Abstract

A distributed data structure is an object which permits many producers to augment or modify its contents, and many consumers simultaneously to access its component elements. Synchronization is implicit in data structure access: a process that requests an element which has not yet been generated blocks until a producer creates it. In this paper, we describe a parallel programming language (called T S) whose fundamental communication device is a significant generalization of the tuple-space distributed data structure found in the Linda coordination language[6]. Our sequential base language is a dialect of Scheme[19]. Beyond the fact that T S is derived by incorporating a tuple-space coordination language into a higher-order computation language (i.e., Scheme), T S differs from other tuple-space languages in two important ways: ffl Tuple-spaces are first-class objects. They may be dynamically created, bound to names, passed as arguments to (or returned as results from) functions, and b...

Citations