Ellie language definition report

Abstract

This report defines the parallel object-oriented language Ellie in details by means of informal definitions and examples. The syntax of Ellie is defined by a grammar. Ellie has been designed as a part of my Ph.D. thesis.The goals of Ellie are to achieve machine independent parallel programming and great language flexibility. Machine independent parallel programming is achieved by allowing the programmer to have a huge number of small processes for a virtual distributed memory parallel computer. If an actual distributed parallel computer can not execute the huge number of processes efficiently then a compiler can combine small processes hereby reducing the number of processes.Great language flexibility is achieved by allowing definitions of new types and control structures and by using a non-strict type system. Ellie is meant as an all-purpose programming language that has the flexibility of languages like Smalltalk and Lisp without losing efficiency in numerical calculations etc.