ColloquiaTalk by John Reppy, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies - Friday, November 30th

[Margery Ishmael]

Computer Science Department - Colloquium Announcement

Date: Friday, November 30th
Time:	2:30 p.m.
Place: Ryerson 251

Title: "Concurrency in the Moby Programming Language"

Speaker: John Reppy, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies

Abstract:  Moby is an experiment in language design and 
implementation.  Its design combines ML-style modules and functional 
programming constructs with class-based, object-oriented features and 
CML-style concurrency.

In this talk, I will start with a brief tour of the Moby project, covering 
the language's origins, its support for class-based object-oriented 
programming, and its infrastructure for supporting extremely efficient 
language inter operability.

The main part of this talk is focused on the design and implementation of 
Moby's concurrency mechanisms.  Moby provides an explicit threading model 
with message-passing primitives for communication and synchronization. Like 
CML, Moby supports first-class synchronous operations, called events, which 
are an abstraction mechanism for building first-class communication and 
synchronization abstractions.  This talk will describe Moby's concurrency 
mechanisms and will illustrate how the event mechanism can be used to 
package complex communication protocols as synchronous operations. I will 
also discuss the implementation of concurrency in Moby, including
compiler and runtime support.

The Moby project is a joint effort with Kathleen Fisher (AT&T Labs --- 
Research).
We have had help from Dan Grossman (Cornell), Riccardo Pucella (Cornell),
Jon Riecke (formerly Bell Labs), Robin Trew (CMU), and Stephanie Weirich 
(Cornell).

http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/jhr

Host: Stuart Kurtz

*The talk will be followed by refreshments in Ryerson 255*
Persons with disabilities who may need assistance, please call 773.834.8977


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Margery Ishmael
Secretary to the Chairman, Department of Computer Science
The University of Chicago
tel. 773.834.8977  fax. 773.702.8487