DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A LAZY INTERPRETER FOR FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE-FP

Abstract

Functional programming languages are gaining impor-tance because of their parallel view of computation. However these languages are very different from von—neumann style of computing, and need either a translator to run them on existing von—neumann computers or new non—von—neUmann computers. The thesis is devoted to the design of a trans-lator to run the functional programming language—FP (proposed by John Backus in 1978) on the von—neumann computers. Some aspects of parallelism in FP are also investigated in the thesis. The interpreter designed for FP works on the principle of lazy interpretation. The designed interpreter is strictly sequential in nature. This report discusses the complete development of sequential lazy-interpreter. This lazy inter-preter is simple and faster than normal interpreter. The design is very modular and algorithm for each module is described in the report. The thesis also investigates parallelism aspect in FP. Towards this direction an algorithm has been developed which analyzes the static and dynamic parallelism properties of a given program. This algorithm also calculates various parameters of multiprocessing system. A study of these parameters has been made and comments for selecting number of processors during the design of multiprocessing system for specific application are made.