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It's Time for a New Old Language

Published:26 January 2017Publication History
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Abstract

The most popular programming language in computer science has no compiler or interpreter. Its definition is not written down in any one place. It has changed a lot over the decades, and those changes have introduced ambiguities and inconsistencies. Today, dozens of variations are in use, and its complexity has reached the point where it needs to be re-explained, at least in part, every time it is used. Much effort has been spent in hand-translating between this language and other languages that do have compilers. The language is quite amenable to parallel computation, but this fact has gone unexploited.

In this talk we will summarize the history of the language, highlight the variations and some of the problems that have arisen, and propose specific solutions. We suggest that it is high time that this language be given a complete formal specification, and that compilers, IDEs, and proof-checkers be created to support it, so that all the best tools and techniques of our trade may be applied to it also.

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  1. It's Time for a New Old Language

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          • Published in

            cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
            ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 52, Issue 8
            PPoPP '17
            August 2017
            442 pages
            ISSN:0362-1340
            EISSN:1558-1160
            DOI:10.1145/3155284
            Issue’s Table of Contents
            • cover image ACM Conferences
              PPoPP '17: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming
              January 2017
              476 pages
              ISBN:9781450344937
              DOI:10.1145/3018743

            Copyright © 2017 Owner/Author

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            Association for Computing Machinery

            New York, NY, United States

            Publication History

            • Published: 26 January 2017

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