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How NESL evaluates expressions

 

The NESL system is interactive: the current implementation is built on top of Common Lisp  and implements a similar read-eval-print loop. Expressions are typed at the NESL prompt and terminated with a semicolon and a carriage return. For example:

<Nesl> 2 + 3;

Compiling..Writing..Loading..Running..
Exiting..Reading..
it = 5 : int
Expressions are compiled dynamically into an intermediate language called VCODE , which is then interpreted by a subprocess. The phases of executing an expression are: This setup makes it relatively easy to run code on remote machines, since the VCODE interpreter can be run remotely, communicating with the NESL system through a shared file system or through calls to rsh and rcp. This is how the CM-2, CM-5, Cray, Maspar, and MPI implementations work.



Guy Blelloch
Tue Nov 28 18:37:09 EST 1995