A high-level, object-oriented approach to divider-and-conquer

An object-oriented framework for the divide-and-conquer (D&C) paradigm is presented. The framework enables a D&C representation of a problem to be built up for subsequent evaluation. This evaluation can be delayed until the maximum amount of computation that can be performed in one D&C pass has been integrated into the representation. This framework does not require a parallelizing compiler and therefore provides an environment that is flexible and easily extensible. D&C thus provides a structure suitable for parallel implementation and object-oriented programming techniques provide a means to encapsulate the D&C semantics and provide a uniform interface to the end-user. Results are presented for an implementation of the back-propagation algorithm.<>