Definition of the DISC concurrent language

Although commercial distributed computers are now available, developing software for these systems is still a hard task. This prevents the users from getting full advantage out of the use of distributed computers. Among the techiniques proposed to make it easier to program the new architectures, concurrent languages have proved to be an effective approach both in system programming and in application development.The concurrent programming language DISC has been designed to promote software engineering techniques in the development of distributed programs. The language extends C with CSP-based concurrent mechanisms and it is especially suited for system programming of loosely coupled distributed architectures. A simple programming environment, running under UNIX System V operating system, allows the user to develop programs in a modular fashion. A first implementation of DISC has been developed on a network of UNIX machines. DISC programs are portable on a wide class of distributed computers, because of both the choice of UNIX as the host environment and the substantial independence of the language run time support from the hardware.In this article we report the definition of DISC and an example to show informally the practical use of the language.