[Jprogramming] Remora: An Array-Oriented Language with Static Rank Polymorphism

[Raul Miller]

I wonder if Remora works well enough that a J interpreter could be
implemented on top of it?

-- 
Raul


On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 9:06 PM, Michal Dobrogost
<michal.dobrogost at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thought you guys may be interested in this.
>
> *Full paper:*
> http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/papers/rank-polymorphism.pdf
>
> *Abstract:*
> The array-computational model pioneered by Iverson’s languages APL and J
> offers a simple and expressive solution to the “von
> Neumann bottleneck.” It includes a form of rank, or dimensional,
> polymorphism, which renders much of a program’s control structure implicit
> by lifting base operators to higher-dimensional array structures.
> We present the first formal semantics for this model, along with the first
> static type system that captures the full power of the core language.
> The formal dynamic semantics of our core language, Remora, illuminates
> several of the murkier corners of the model. This allows us to
> resolve some of the model’s ad hoc elements in more general, regular
> ways. Among these, we can generalise the model from SIMD to MIMD
> computations, by extending the semantics to permit functions to be lifted
> to higher-dimensional arrays in the same way as their arguments.
> Our static semantics, a dependent type system of carefully restricted
> power, is capable of describing array computations whose dimensions
> cannot be determined statically. The type-checking problem is decidable
> and the type system is accompanied by the usual soundness theorems.
> Our type system’s principal contribution is that it serves to extract the
> implicit control structure that provides so much of the language’s
> expressive power, making this structure explicitly apparent at compile time.
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