An operational semantics for Paragon: A design notation for parallel architectures

The need to design and verify architectures to support parallel implementations of declarative languages has led to the development of a novel language, called Paragon, which bridges the gap between the top-level specification of the abstract machine, and its detailed implementation in terms of parallel processes and message passing. The central technical contributions in this paper are:

? The introduction and specification of Paragon, a parallel object-oriented language based on graph rewriting and message passing principles.

? An illustration of the approach at work in the design of a parallel supercombinator graph reduction machine.

? A sketch proof that this design meets the requirements statement.