ACM Computing Surveys 28A(4), December 1996, http://www.acm.org/surveys/1996/Formatting/. Copyright © 1996 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. See the permissions statement below.
William G. Griswold,
Richard Wolski,
Scott B. Baden,
Stephen J. Fink
Scott R. Kohn
Department of Chemistry
Abstract: Because our rapidly changing world has sent us on a quest for application-level programming with maximum performance, intermediary agents--library programmers--are developing new application abstractions incorporating the newest technology. Consequently, the next-millennium programming language should be designed for library developers, not application programmers. Because it is impossible to anticipate the particular needs of application developers, programming languages should make few design commitments, yet provide abstraction and runtime facilities so that library programmers have the ability to make those commitments at will. In some respects, however, the stability problem has simply been moved from language and compiler developers to library developers. Semantically informed programming tools will prove valuable in evolving both libraries and user code.Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.2.2 [Software Engineering]: Tools and Techniques - Modules and interfaces, Software libraries; D.2.7 [Software Engineering]: Distribution and Maintenance - Enhancement, Extensibility; D.2.10 [Software Engineering]: Design - Methodologies; D.3.3 [Programming Languages]: Language Constructs and Features; D.3.4 [Programming Languages]: Processors - Optimization, Run-time environments; D.1.3 [Programming Techniques]: Concurrent Programming - Parallel programming
General Terms: Design, Economics, Languages, Performance
Additional Key Words and Phrases: Meta-languages, scientific computing
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