Control flow extensions to the dataflow language SISAL

The proponents of the dataflow programming model have been citing its advantages; exposing fine grain parallelism, freedom from side-effects, and synchronization based purely on data dependencies. Opponents of the model cite large overheads incurred in utilizing the fine grain parallelism, the lack of facilities to specify coarse grain parallelism, and lack of explicit control of the concurrent activities. More recently, there have been numerous proposals for combining some control flow concepts with the dataflow model. The authors' research differs from these primarily because the attempt to bring the dataflow language closer to more popular control flow based concurrent programming languages, while retaining the fundamental properties of dataflow models. Their main goal is to provide the programmer with mechanisms to define and control coarse grain concurrency. To this end, they have extended the SISAL language (for Sequent) by including fork, join and break constructs.<
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