SISAL

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SISAL

SISAL (Streams and Iteration in a Single Assignment Language) is a general-purpose single assignment

Single assignment

Single assignment is used to describe a computer programming programming language or representation in which one cannot bind a value to a name if a value has already been bound to that name....
functional programming language

Programming language

A programming language is a machine-readable artificial language designed to express computations that can be performed by a machine, particularly a computer....
with strict semantics, implicit parallelism

Implicit parallelism

In computer science, implicit parallelism is a characteristic of a programming language that allows a compiler or interpreter to automatically exploit the parallel computing inherent to the computations expressed by some of the language's constructs....
, and efficient array handling. SISAL outputs a dataflow

Dataflow

Dataflow is a term used in computing, and may have various shades of meaning. It is closely related to message passing....
graph in Intermediary Form 1 (IF1). It was derived from VAL (Value-oriented Algorithmic Language), and adds recursion

Recursion

Recursion, in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining Function in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition....
and finite streams. It has a Pascal-like syntax and was designed to be a common high-level language for numerical programs on a variety of multiprocessors.

L was defined in 1983 by James McGraw et al, at the University of Manchester

University of Manchester

The University of Manchester is a "red brick university" civic university located in Manchester, England. It is a member of the Russell Group of large research-intensive universities and the N8 Group for research collaboration....
, LLNL

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California is a scientific research laboratory founded by the University of California in 1952....
, Colorado State University

Colorado State University

Colorado State University is a public institution of higher learning located in Fort Collins, Colorado, Colorado in the United States. Colorado State University is the state's Morrill Act university and the flagship campus university of the Colorado State University System....
and DEC

Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering United States company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC ....
.

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History

SISAL was defined in 1983 by James McGraw et al, at the University of Manchester

University of Manchester

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California is a scientific research laboratory founded by the University of California in 1952....
, Colorado State University

Colorado State University

Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering United States company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC ....
. It was revised in 1985, and the first compiled implementation was made in 1986. Its performance is superior to C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language originally developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories to implement the Unix operating system....
and rivals Fortran

Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose programming language, procedural programming language, imperative programming language programming language that is especially suited to numerical analysis and scientific computing....
, according to some sources, combined with efficient and automatic parallelization.

SISAL's name came from grep

Grep

grep is a command line interface text search utility originally written for Unix. The name is taken from the first letters in global / regular expression / print, a series of instructions for the ed text editor....
ping "sal" for "Single Assignment Language" from the Unix dictionary /usr/dict/words.

Versions exist for the Cray

Cray

Cray Inc. is a supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. , was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray....
X-MP

Cray X-MP

The Cray X-MP was a supercomputer designed, built and sold by Cray. The company's first parallel processing vector processor machine and a fourth generation super, it was the 1982 successor to the 1976 Cray-1, and the world's fastest computer 1983–1985....
, Y-MP

Cray Y-MP

The Cray Y-MP was a supercomputer sold by Cray from 1988, and the successor to the company's Cray X-MP. The Y-MP retained software compatibility with the X-MP, but extended the address registers from 24 to 32 bits....
, 2

Cray-2

The Cray-2 was a vector processor supercomputer made by Cray starting in 1985. It was the fastest machine in the world when it was released, replacing Cray's own Cray X-MP in that spot....
; Sequent

Sequent Computer Systems

Sequent Computer Systems, or Sequent, was a computer company that designed and manufactured multiprocessing computer systems. They were among the pioneers in high-performance symmetric multiprocessing Open system , innovating in both hardware and software ....
, Encore Alliant

Encore Computer

Encore Computer was an early pioneer in the parallel computing market, based in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Although offering a number of system designs beginning in 1985, they were never as well known as other companies in this field such as Pyramid Technology, Alliant Computer Systems, and the most similar systems Sequent Computer Systems a...
, dataflow

Dataflow

Dataflow is a term used in computing, and may have various shades of meaning. It is closely related to message passing....
architectures, Transputer

INMOS transputer

A transputer was a pioneering concurrent computing microprocessor design of the 1980s from INMOS, a United Kingdom semiconductor device company based in Bristol....
s and systolic array

Systolic array

In computer architecture, a systolic array is a pipe network arrangement of processing units called cells. It is a specialized form of parallel computing, where cells , compute data and store it independently of each other....
s.

External links

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