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5 - Kahn networks at the dawn of functional programming

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2010

By
David B. MacQueen
Edited by
Yves Bertot ,
Gérard Huet ,
Jean-Jacques Lévy  and
Gordon Plotkin
David B. MacQueen
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Yves Bertot
Affiliation:
INRIA-Sophia Antipolis, France
Gérard Huet
Affiliation:
Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), Rocquencourt
Jean-Jacques Lévy
Affiliation:
Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), Rocquencourt
Gordon Plotkin
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

Introduction

The evolution of programming languages involves isolating and describing abstractions that allow us to solve problems more elegantly, efficiently, and reliably, and then providing appropriate linguistic support for these abstractions. Ideally, a new abstraction can be described precisely with a mathematical semantics, and the semantics leads to logical techniques for reasoning about programs that use the abstraction. Gilles Kahn's early work on stream processing networks is a beautiful example of this process at work.

Gilles began thinking about parallel graph programs at Stanford, and he developed his ideas in a series of papers starting in 1971: and. Gilles' original motivation was to provide a formal model for reasoning about aspects of operating systems programming, based on early data flow models of computation. But the model he developed turned out to be of much more general interest, both in terms of program architecture and in terms of semantics. During his Edinburgh visit in 1975–76, Gilles and I collaborated on a prototype implementation of the model that allowed further development and experimentation, reported in. By 1976 it was clear that his model, while inspired by early data flow research, was also closely connected to several other developments, including coroutines, Landin's notion of streams, and the then emerging lazy functional languages.

Type
Chapter
Information
From Semantics to Computer Science
Essays in Honour of Gilles Kahn
 , pp. 95 - 138
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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