Synonyms
Definition
Connection Machine Lisp (CM-Lisp) is a data-parallel version of Lisp developed around 1987 for Connection Machine supercomputers manufactured by Thinking Machines Corporation. Unlike the ∗ Lisp language, it drew no sharp distinction between front-end data and parallel data, and provided for parallel processing of S-expressions, not just numbers and bit fields. CM-Lisp introduced an aggregate data type called a xapping, which was essentially a (not necessarily finite) map from S-expressions to S-expressions, and special syntax for performing elementwise operations, reductions, and permutations on these data structures.
Discussion
Of the four programming languages ( ∗ Lisp, C ∗, CM Fortran, and CM-Lisp) provided by Thinking Machines Corporation for Connection Machine Systems, CM-Lisp was the most radical in design (requiring the use of non-ASCII characters in its notation, and introducing an associative data structure indexed by nonnumeric values) and the...
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Steele, G.L. (2011). Connection Machine Lisp. In: Padua, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4_381
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4_381
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