Qlisp: parallel processing in Lisp

One of the major problems in converting serial programs to take advantage of parallel processing has been the lack of a multiprocessing language that is both powerful and understandable to programmers. The authors describe multiprocessing extensions to Common Lisp designed to be suitable for studying styles of parallel programming at the medium-grain level in a shared-memory architecture. The resulting language is called Qlisp. Two features for addressing synchronization problems are included in Qlisp. The first is the concept of heavyweight features, and the second is a novel type of function called a partially multiply invoked function. An initial implementation of Qlisp has been carried out, and various experiments performed. Results to date indicate that its performance is about as good as expected.<>