The NIL Distributed Systems Programming Language: A Status Report

Abstract

This paper is a summary of ongoing research activities related to the programming language NIL, a high level language for concurrent and distributed systems developed at IBM Yorktown. We first present a short summary of the major features of NIL. These include the NIL system model, which is a dynamically evolving network of loosely coupled processes, communicating by message passing; the abstract NIL computation model; and typestate, which is a refinement of type systems allowing a compiler to assume an important subset of program validation. We then discuss issues related to providing a semantic theory for NIL, and list some general requirements a semantic model should satisfy to be applicable to practical concurrent and distributed systems. We discuss the fit between CCS, which we are studying as a possible candidate for such a semantic theory, and these requirements. Finally we describe some recent work on transformations which map NIL programs to efficient distributed and parallel implementations. © 1985, ACM. All rights reserved.