Program development within the mathematician's devil

Abstract Advances in technology have resulted in the development of many different multiprocessor systems. Unfortunately, these have not been accompanied by advances in helpful, portable program development environments. This paper highlights the major problems facing designers of such development environments and suggests one possible solution, namely the Mathematician's Devil. Following an overview of the project the paper concentrates on the programming interface provided by the system, and concludes with a statement of the current project status.