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We are pleased to announce a new public release of Pict, a concurrent
programming language based on the pi-calculus.
Version 4.1 is a bug-fix and portability release. There are no
user-visible changes, but several installation problems have been
dealt with.
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Pict is a language in the ML tradition, formed by adding a layer of
convenient syntactic sugar and a static type system to a tiny core.
The current release includes a Pict-to-C compiler, reference manual,
language tutorial, numerous libraries, and example programs.
The core language - an asynchronous variant of Milner, Parrow, and
Walker's pi-calculus - has been used as a theoretical foundation for a
broad class of concurrent computations. The goal in Pict is to
identify high-level idioms that arise naturally when these primitives
are used to build working programs - idioms such as basic data
structures, protocols for returning results, higher-order programming,
selective communication, and concurrent objects. The type system
integrates a number of features found in recent work on theoretical
foundations for typed object-oriented languages: higher-order
polymorphism, simple recursive types, subtyping, and a powerful
partial type inference algorithm.
Highlights of the last major release (4.0) were...
* a complete formal definition
* a separate compilation facility
* an expanded set of standard libraries
* a binary distribution for simpler installation on some common
architectures (a full source distribution is also available)
* numerous simplifications and generalizations from previous
releases.
The current release of the compiler is available in both source and
(for Solaris and Linux) binary form from:
<URL:http://www.cs.indiana.edu/ftp/pierce/pict/>
For the binary distribution, go to the subdirectory labeled pict-NNN
with the largest version number NNN and retrieve the file
pict-NNN.ARCH.tar.gz for an appropriate value of ARCH. To use the
binary distribution, you will need a unix workstation with the Gnu
make utility, the Gnu C compiler, and (for some of the demos) X11.
For the source distribution, retrieve the file pict-NNN.tar.gz, with
the largest version number NNN. In addition to the tools listed above,
you will need the Objective CAML compiler, available from
<URL:ftp://ftp.inria.fr/pub/lang/caml-light/>.
Enjoy,
Benjamin C. Pierce (pierce _at_ cs.indiana.edu)
David N. Turner (dnt _at_ an-teallach.com)
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