Communications of the ACM
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Extended functional programming language (EFP) is an extended version of FP[BJ78] which can simply manipulate the operations on syntactically represented data structures[SR87]. In EFP a complex operation such as insertion of node in a binary tree will be expressed in a set of parallel operations which are much simpler. Both CTA (cellular tree architecture) [MG80] and DFA (Data Flow Architecture) [RM83] can be used to implement the operations on data structures(in particular) in parallel. CTA which has a full binary tree structure contains an array of independent cells which are the leaves of the tree. Each cell will be involved with only one symbol of the syntactically represented data structure. Since these cells are independent, they can perform the operations on these symbols in parallel. So in CTA, we get parallelism within the operations as well as between the operations. For DFA, each complex operation will be converted to a sequence of primitive operations which may be performed in parallel. This sequence of operations will be represented by a basic block of instructions[RM83]. All the instructions with the number of dependencies equal to zero can be performed in parallel(if there are enough processors). Each instruction represents a primitive operation. Only one processor is involved with the execution of each instruction. So there is no parallelism within the operation but only between the operations. In [SR87] these two computer architectures have been briefly described and by giving some examples, it has been shown how a specific function can be implemented on these computer architectures. At the end, these two computer architectures have been compared and contrasted by discussing some advantages and disadvantages of each method.