ML with Concurrency: Design, Analysis, Implementation, and Application

Pure functional languages are easy to reason about but are not in widespread use. By the skillful integration of imperative features, Standard ML has achieved much wider use. However, existing systems often have many components that must execute at the same time, and the integration of concurrency primitives shows promise of being useful for such tasks. Software development then can take place in the secure world of the strong polymorphic typing and modules system of Standard ML. This book surveys a number of recent approaches to the integration of the functional and concurrent programming paradigms. This is a wide spectrum, and in this book we concentrate on extensions of Standard ML with new primitives for concurrency. This involves the design of multiparadig- matic languages, methods for describing their semantics, techniques for the analysis of fragments of the languages, and finally, approaches to distributed implementation. Closely related, but not covered in this book, are the higher-order process calculi and the parallel implementations of existing functional languages.