High Level VAL Constructs in a Static Data Flow Machine

Abstract

The Dennis-Misunas Form 1 Data Flow Machine can best be described as a static and scalar machine. Despite these two limiting characteristics, it is still possible to translate the whole of the functional programming language VAL into the base language of this machine. Methods for translating the various high constructs of VAL are presented which exploit the parallelism inherent in programs written in VAL mainly by pipelining through a single expression (vertical parallelism) rather than employing many copies of that same expression (horizontal parallelism), although the latter is not ruled out.