Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

The execution of a program may be viewed as the processing of a statement in a programming language by an underlying interpreter. This report discusses briefly the advantages of a data flow language over conventional programming methods, and then presents a new interpreter for a data flow language. Using as a base the data flow language of Dennis ["First Version of a Data Flow Procedure Language" Computation Structures Group Memo 93, Project MAC, MIT, Nov. 1973], the new interpreter magnifies the apparent asynchrony and speed of data flow, and it does so by (quite literally) exchanging blocks of processors for slices of time. The report gives details of the operation of this new interpreter, and identifies the consequences of the new interpreter on machine architecture and design.