IMPROVED DEL-STYLE EXECUTION ARCHITECTURE FOR FP.

Abstract

FP is a functional programming language proposed by John Backus to liberate programming from the 'von Neumann style'. FP comprises a set of objects, a set of primitive functions, a set of functional forms and an 'application' operator. In FP, all programs are functions built from the existing functions using the functional forms. There are no variables in an FP program. All functions map objects into objects and always take a single argument. Details of the FP syntax can be seen in Backus's Turing award lecture. Following that proposal, a number of architectures have been designed to execute functional languages. The goal of our project was to define an architecture (FP machine model) that would permit us to implement FP easily and efficiently on a conventional von Neumann machine. This paper describes the improved DELfp architecture.