Serialization of SVP requests-a locking proposal for APL

Abstract

How does APL fit into the new wave of distributed systems and parallel processing? Thanks to shared variables, APL offers a simple, yet powerful, communication link between independent processors. But at the core of any reliable parallel processing application there must be a method of serialization. Although APL currently offers a very useful access control facility for shared variables, it fails to provide the basic locking mechanism required by distributed application developers to prevent simultaneous specifications. This paper proposes an APL language extension to achieve serialization with shared variables.