The SR Programming Language

Book excerpt: SR (Synchronizing Resources) is a powerful and flexible language for concurrent programming. With its explicit mechanisms and concurrency, communication, and synchronization, programmers can easily learn to write programs for both shared- and distributed-memory applications and machines.This book, written by the language designers, provides a complete introduction to SR and gives the reader the tools for learning about and experimenting with concurrency. Features Provides an accessible, clear introduction to SR by the language designers. Teaches practical techniques through numerous realistic examples of parallel and distributed programming problems. Examines 'classic' concurrent programming problems as well as many important parallel and distributed programming problems. Illustrates trade-offs between language mechanisms to help the reader understand and make optimum design decisions Reinforces key points with numerous end-of-chapter exercises Includes six appendices that summarize the language for quick reference, show how to develop and execute programs, and describe the implementation. The SR language implementation is available, free, from the SR Project, University of Arizona, at ftp://cs.arizona.edu/sr/. 0805300880B04062001