Edison(ID:896/edi004)Simplified coroutine Pascal for teaching(named for the American inventor Thomas Edison) Per Brinch Hansen. A simplified Concurrent Pascal, with modules and concurrency (cobegin/coend). Brinch Hansen designed Edison to explore features of concurrency Related languages
References: in Software - Practice and Experience 11(04) April 1981 view details Introduction While it is not yet clear whether Ada, BLISS, Mary/2, Modula-2, Mesa, C, CLU, Edison, Concurrent Euclid, Icon, Newton, PLAIN, PLUS, Praxis, Smalltalk, SQURL, Y, or some other language is "best" for systems programming, each language represents an advance towards the goal of supporting an understandable and efficient organization of the many details and relationships inherent in systems programming. Unfortunately, no one language has yet achieved the delicate balance between simplicity and power that would distinguish it as ideal, but it appears that Modula-2 comes quite close. Modula-2 represents a step forward in language design, both because it incorporates existing features instead of inventing its own, and because of its evident concern for simplicity. Modula-2 offers the following valuable language features: Simplicity. Few primitive datatypes are defined, few control constructs are supported (there is no "go to"), and input-output operations are not provided as part of the language (they can be provided via extensions written in Modula-2). This simplicity allows for easier standardization and better portability than can be achieved with most other languages. Modules A module is a named collection of variables and procedures, similar to an Ada package. It controls the interfacing and encapsulation of the conceptual parts making up large software systems. Modules provide a more flexible solution to the problem of partitioning the name space of a large program than does the more familiar hierarchical nesting of procedures. They are so valuable they are even being force-fitted onto existing languages. Separate Compilation. Modules may be compiled separately, providing good management for large programsr and definition modules allow for specifying interfaces without giving implementation details. Flexible Datatypes. Strong datatypes are enforced, but this can be relaxed when necessary in systems programming to just declaring a parameter to be a word, an address, or an array of words. Machine Access. Access to specific memory addresses and other characteristics of the underlying machine is supported. Tasking. Flexible and efficient tasking is provided by coroutine management routines. in SIGPLAN Notices 17(08) August 1982 view details in [ACM SIGPLAN] SIGPLAN Notices 28(03) March 1993 The second ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages (HOPL II) view details |