Alef (programming language)
| Alef | |
|---|---|
| Paradigm | compiled, concurrent, structured |
| Designed by | Phil Winterbottom |
| First appeared | 1992; 33 years ago (1992) |
| Typing discipline | Static, strong |
| OS | Plan 9 from Bell Labs |
| Influenced by | |
| C, Newsqueak | |
| Influenced | |
| Limbo, Rust, Go | |
Alef is a discontinued concurrent programming language, designed as part of the Plan 9 operating system by Phil Winterbottom of Bell Labs. It implemented the channel-based concurrency model of Newsqueak in a compiled, C-like language.
History
[edit ]Alef appeared in the first and second editions of Plan 9, but was abandoned during development of the third edition.[1] [2] Rob Pike later explained Alef's demise by pointing to its lack of automatic memory management, despite Pike's and other people's urging Winterbottom to add garbage collection to the language;[3] also, in a February 2000 slideshow, Pike noted: "...although Alef was a fruitful language, it proved too difficult to maintain a variant language across multiple architectures, so we took what we learned from it and built the thread library for C."[4]
Alef was superseded by two programming environments. The Limbo programming language can be considered a direct successor of Alef and is the most commonly used language in the Inferno operating system. The Alef concurrency model was replicated in the third edition of Plan 9 in the form of the libthread library, which makes some of Alef's functionality available to C programs and allowed existing Alef programs (such as Acme) to be translated.[5]
Example
[edit ]This example was taken from the Alef reference manual.[1] The piece illustrates the use of the tuple data type.
(int,byte*,byte) func() { return(10,"hello",'c'); } void main() { inta; byte*str; bytec; (a,str,c)=func(); }
See also
[edit ]References
[edit ]- ^ a b Winterbottom, Phil (1995). "Alef Language Reference Manual". Plan 9 Programmer's Manual: Volume Two. Murray Hill: AT&T.
- ^ "Preface to the Third (2000) Edition". Plan 9 Manual. Murray Hill: Bell Labs. June 2000. Archived from the original on 2015年02月05日. Retrieved 2012年10月29日.
- ^ Pike, Rob (2010). Origins of Go concurrency style. OSCON Emerging Languages Camp. Archived from the original on 2021年12月13日.
- ^ Pike, Rob. "Rio: Design of a Concurrent Window System" (PDF). Retrieved 8 March 2013.
- ^ "thread(2)". Plan 9 Manual. Retrieved 2012年10月29日.
- Flandrena, Bob (1995). "Alef Users' Guide". Plan 9 Programmer's Manual: Volume Two. Murray Hill: Bell Labs.
- Phil Winterbottom (1992年10月20日). "Plan9 VM". Newsgroup: comp.os.research. Usenet: 1c1denINN441@darkstar.UCSC.EDU.
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