Alef (programming language)

Last updated
Alef
Paradigm compiled, concurrent, structured
Designed by Phil Winterbottom
First appeared1992;32 years ago (1992)
Typing discipline Static, strong
OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs
Influenced by
C, Newsqueak
Influenced
Limbo, Rust, Go

Alef is a discontinued concurrent programming language, designed as part of the Plan 9 operating system by Phil Winterbottom of Bell Labs. It implemented the channel-based concurrency model of Newsqueak in a compiled, C-like language.

Contents

History

Alef appeared in the first and second editions of Plan 9, but was abandoned during development of the third edition. [1] [2] Rob Pike later explained Alef's demise by pointing to its lack of automatic memory management, despite Pike's and other people's urging Winterbottom to add garbage collection to the language; [3] also, in a February 2000 slideshow, Pike noted: "…although Alef was a fruitful language, it proved too difficult to maintain a variant language across multiple architectures, so we took what we learned from it and built the thread library for C." [4]

Alef was superseded by two programming environments. The Limbo programming language can be considered a direct successor of Alef and is the most commonly used language in the Inferno operating system. The Alef concurrency model was replicated in the third edition of Plan 9 in the form of the libthread library, which makes some of Alef's functionality available to C programs and allowed existing Alef programs (such as Acme) to be translated. [5]

Example

This example was taken from the Alef reference manual. [1] The piece illustrates the use of the tuple data type.

(int,byte*,byte)func(){return(10,"hello",'c');}voidmain(){inta;byte*str;bytec;(a,str,c)=func();}

See also

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References

  1. 1 2 Winterbottom, Phil (1995). "Alef Language Reference Manual". Plan 9 Programmer's Manual: Volume Two. Murray Hill: AT&T.
  2. ↑ "Preface to the Third (2000) Edition". Plan 9 Manual. Murray Hill: Bell Labs. June 2000. Archived from the original on 2015-02-05. Retrieved 2012-10-29.
  3. ↑ Pike, Rob (2010). Origins of Go concurrency style. OSCON Emerging Languages Camp. Archived from the original on 2021-12-13.
  4. ↑ Pike, Rob. "Rio: Design of a Concurrent Window System" (PDF). Retrieved 8 March 2013.
  5. ↑ "thread(2)". Plan 9 Manual. Retrieved 2012-10-29.


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