Abstract

. We present the semantics of the annotations pcall and fork for parallel evaluation of Scheme. Annotated programs are proved to be behaviourly indistinguishable from their non-annotated counterparts, even in the presence of first-class continuations and side-effects. The semantics takes the form of an abstract machine, which can be regarded as a guideline for an implementation. 1 Introduction Parallelism is usually considered as a promising way of speeding up the execution of programs. Nevertheless, the adjunction of several processors does not immediately guarantee a speedup of programs execution. Indeed, overheads due to synchronisations, process forking, and information copying and sharing can increase the execution time. In this perspective, the design of programming languages supporting parallelism and able to tame parallel architectures has become an important research subject, especially since parallel computers are more frequent and cheaper. Functional languages allow the pr...

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