ParaSail language themes and philosophy

o what will make ParaSail an interesting programming language? What is the philosophy behind the language? ParaSail tries to minimize implicit operations, implicit parameters, implicit dynamic binding (virtual function calls), implicit initializations, implicit conversions, etc. This is both in the name of clarity for the human reader, and in the name of formal testability and verifiability. ParaSail uses a small number of concepts to represent all of the various composition mechanisms such as records, packages, classes, modules, templates, capsules, structures, etc. Arrays and more general containers are treated uniformly.

On the other hand, ParaSail allows many things to proceed in parallel by default, effectively inserting implicit parallelism everywhere. Parameter evaluation is logically performed in parallel. The language disallows uses that would make the result depend on the order or concurrency of parameter evaluation. The iterations of a for loop are by default executed in parallel. Explicit ordering must be specified if it is required by the algorithm. Even sequential statements are essentially converted into a data-flow based DAG which is then evaluated in parallel in so far as possible. In all cases, the language disallows code that could result in race conditions due to inadequately synchronized access to shared data, either by using per-thread data, structured safe synchronization, or a handoff semantics (similar to that of linear types, distributed languages like Hermes, or the UVM virtual memory system).

Of course much of this implicit parallelism is possible in pure functional languages, and ParaSail will support a functional programming style where it works naturally. Unfortunately, doing some relatively straightforward things in pure functional languages can require mind-bending (for me) concepts like monads, while a good old assignment statement is something that most programmers understand. With apologies to the political world, ParaSail will try to make assignments statements safe, legal, and rare.