Concurrent Programming in ML

Abstract

Decent Beginner Book Concurrent Programming ML (CML), included as part of the SML of New Jersey (SML/NJ) distribution, combines the best features of concurrent programming and functional programming. This practical, how-to book focuses on the use of concurrency to implement naturally concurrent applications. In addition to a tutorial introduction to programming in CML, the book presents three extended examples using CML for practical systems programming: a parallel software build system, a simple concurrent window manager, and an implementation of distributed tuple spaces. This book also illustrates advanced SML programming techniques, and includes a chapter on the implementation of concurrency using features provided by the SML/NJ system. It will be of interest to programmers, students, and professional researchers working in computer language development. My Personal Review: Ive just finished the end of the book and I will say its not too bad. A little background about me before my full review, Im a web developer with a design background, so Ive done a lot of front-end design work for clients but Ive also worked a bit of the back end with PHP, and Classic ASP. .NET was new to me and never worked with my preferred IDE, (ahem Dreamweaver) past .net 2.0, recently more and more clients are asking for ASP.net / Sharepoint work from me so Ive decided to study up on ASP.net. Strait to the point, the book isnt dry and it does what it says, it walks you thru chapter by chapter explaining every technical bit of data regarding ASP.net and occasionally telling you something interesting about one of the tools for real world use. The pros for buying this book is that you get a clear understanding of ASP.net, the history and where its going, as well as some simple tricks using VS 2008, LINQ, and ASP.net controls and forms, it also has sample code on the disc, and a PDF of the book on the CD for on-screen reference. My only problem with this book, (like so many other developer books) is that they really dont give real-world scenarios for building a e-commerce site, or a blog, or a contact form for that matter. Its a better starter book than a for Dummies or ..in 24 years but it does the job to get you started using ASP.net.

Commercial users of functional programming workshop report

“…Star amalgamated influences from various languages: in particular functions as an organizing principle from other functional languages, macros from April (McCabe & Clark, 1995) and Lisp to support syntactic extensibility, as well as the Concurrent ML substrate for parallelism and concurrency (Reppy, 1999). The type system borrows much from Haskell, as Star's type contracts are a variant of Haskell's type classes (Wadler & Blott, 1989).…”

Transactional Monitors for Concurrent Objects

“…Incorporating explicit concurrency abstractions within high-level languages has a long history [22,23,18,9,36], as does deriving parallelism from unannotated programs either through compiler analysis [31] or through explicit annotations and pragmas [39]. Our ideas differ from these efforts insofar as we are concerned with providing abstractions that simplify the complexity of locking and synchronization.…”

Programming in Manticore, a Heterogenous Parallel Functional Language

“…Manticore's concurrency mechanisms are based on Concurrent ML (CML) [71], which provides support for threads and synchronous message passing. Manticore's support for fine-grain parallelism is influenced by previous work on nested dataparallel languages, such as NESL [7,6,8] and Nepal [15,16,49].…”

“…The explicit-concurrency mechanisms of Manticore are based on Concurrent ML (CML) [71]. CML extends SML with synchronous message passing over typed channels and a powerful abstraction mechanism, called first-class synchronous operations, for building synchronization and communication abstractions.…”

“…This mechanism allows programmers to encapsulate complicated communication and synchronization protocols as first-class abstractions, which encourages a modular style of programming where the actual underlying channels used to communicate with a given thread are hidden behind data and type abstraction. CML has been used successfully in a number of systems, including a multithreaded GUI toolkit [34], a distributed tuple-space implementation [71], and a system for implementing partitioned applications in a distributed setting [81]. The design of CML has inspired many implementations of CML-style concurrency primitives in other languages.…”