Id (programming language)

Irvine Dataflow (Id) is a general-purpose parallel programming language, started at the University of California at Irvine in 1975^[1] by Arvind and K. P. Gostelow.^[2] Arvind continued work with Id at MIT into the 1990s.

The major subset of Id is a purely functional programming language with non-strict semantics. Features include: higher-order functions, a Milner-style statically type-checked polymorphic type system with overloading, user defined types and pattern matching, and prefix and infix operators. It led to the development of pH, a parallel dialect of Haskell.

Id programs are fine grained implicitly parallel.

The MVar synchronisation variable abstraction in Haskell is based on Id's M-structures.^[3]

Examples

   type bool = False | True;

   False? :: bool -> bool
   and :: bool -> bool -> bool

Implementations

pHluid

The pHluid system was a research implementation of Id programming language, with future plans for a front-end for pH, a parallel dialect of the Haskell programming language, implemented at Digital's Cambridge Research Laboratory. and non-profit use. It is targeted at standard Unix workstation hardware.

References

1. Sharp, J.A. (1992). Data Flow Computing: Theory and Practice. Intellect, Limited. p. 125. ISBN 9780893919214. Retrieved 2014-12-02.
2. Arvind & K. P. Gostelow, The Id Report: An Asychronous Language and Computing Machine, Technical Report TR-114, Department of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, September 1978.
3. "Concurrent Haskell". Peyton-Jones, Gordon and Finne. POPL 1996

External links

• ID Language Reference Manual, Rishiyur S. Nikhil, 1991.
• "An Asynchronous Programming Language for a Large Multiprocessor Machine", Arvind et al., TR114a, Dept ISC, UC Irvine, Dec 1978