[Pl-seminar] Guy Steele at Harvard, Sep 27

[Norman Ramsey]

Members of this list might have some interest in the following talk:


Norman


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Initiative in Innovative Computing

Seminar Series

Wednesday, September 27, 2006; 4pm

Guy L. Steele Jr., Sun Fellow

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

  <http://iic.harvard.edu/events/> http://iic.harvard.edu/events/

The Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) is pleased to announce the
2006-2007 Seminar Series.   You are invited to join us for the first seminar
on September 27th with Guy Steele to kick-off our series. Dr. Steele is a
researcher with Sun Microsystems Laboratories, working on the Programming
Language Research project.

His research interests include Algorithms, Compilation, Distributed Systems,
High Performance Computing, Java, Lisp Scheme, Object Oriented Programming,
Operating Systems, Programming Languages, Software, and Supercomputer
design.

Seminar Title: The Fortress Programming Language

Seminar Abstract:

The Programming Language Research Group at Sun Microsystems Laboratories is
trying to apply lessons learned from the Java (TM) Programming Language to
the next generation of programming languages. The Java language supports
platform-independent parallel programming with explicit multithreading and
explicit locks.  As part of the

DARPA program for High Productivity Computing Systems, we are developing
Fortress, a language intended to support large-scale scientific computation.
One of the design principles is that parallelism be encouraged everywhere
(for example, it is intentionally just a little bit harder to write a
sequential loop than a parallel loop).  Another design principle is to have
rich mechanisms for encapsulation and abstraction; the idea is to have a
fairly complicated language for library writers that enables them to write
libraries that present a relatively simple set of interfaces to the
application programmer.  A third design principle is to try to use standard
mathematical notation as part of the programming language wherever possible;
this is an old idea that failed in the 1960s, but the modern widespread
acceptance of Unicode makes it easier to revisit the idea.  We will discuss
these design principles and show some examples of Fortress code to
illustrate them.

Seminar Series schedule is available on the IIC website -
<http://iic.harvard.edu/events.php> http://iic.harvard.edu/events.php. The
website will be updated often with additional information and seminars.

All IIC seminars will be held at the 60 Oxford Street Building, Room 330
unless otherwise noted.

Day and Date:              Wednesday, September 27, 2006 - 4:00pm

Location:                         60 Oxford Street, Room 330

Parking:                         Parking is available in the 52 Oxford
Street Garage. Please tell the attendant that you are attending the IIC
Seminar.   A map is available on line at
<http://iic.harvard.edu/contact.php> http://iic.harvard.edu/contactphp.