A COST CALCULUS FOR PARALLEL FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING

Building a cost calculus for a parallel program development environmen t is difficult because of the many degrees of freedom available in par allel implementations and because of difficulties with compositionalit y. We present a strategy for building cost calculi for skeleton-based programming languages which can be used for derivational software deve lopment and which deals in a pragmatic way with the difficulties of co mposition. The approach is illustrated for the Bird-Meertens theory of lists, a parallel functional language with an associated equational t ransformation system. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.