Essential features of a compiler target language for parallel machines

Abstract

Term Graph Rewriting Systems (TGRS) have been used extensively as an implementation vehicle for a number of, often divergent, programming paradigms ranging from the traditional functional programming ones to the (concurrent) logic programming ones and various amalgamations of them, to (concurrent) object-oriented ones. More recently, the relationship between TGRS and process calculi (such as the π-calculus) as well as Linear Logic has also been explored. In this paper we describe our experience in using an intermediate Compiler Target Language (CTL) based on TGRS for mapping a variety of programming paradigms of the aforementioned types onto it, highlighting in the process some of the issues which we feel any such intermediate representation should address and which form effectively a minimum set of features every CTL should possess.