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Functional Languages

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Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing

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Definition

Parallel functional languages are parallel variants of functional languages, that is, languages that treat computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoid state and mutable data. Functional languages are founded on the lambda calculus. The majority of parallel functional languages add a small number of high-level parallel coordination constructs to some functional language, although some introduce parallelism without changing the language.

Discussion

Introduction

The potential of functional languages for parallelism has been recognized for over 30 years, for example [44]. The key advantage of functional languages is that they mainly, or solely, contain stateless computations. Subject to data dependencies between the computations, the evaluation of stateless computations can be arbitrarily reordered or interleaved while preserving the sequential semantics.

Parallel programs must not only specify the computation, that is, a correct and efficient algorithm,...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton, EH14 4AS, Edinburgh, UK

    Philip Trinder Professor

  2. School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton, EH14 4AS, Edinburgh, UK

    Hans-Wolfgang Loidl Dr

  3. School of Computer Science, University of St. Andrews, Room 0.07, Jack Cole Building, KY16 9SX, North Haugh, St. Andrews, UK

    Kevin Hammond Professor

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  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    David Padua

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Trinder, P., Loidl, HW., Hammond, K. (2011). Functional Languages. In: Padua, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4_201

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