SISAL reference manual

In this report we describe the SISAL 2.0 programming language. The project began in 1982 as a cooperative venture by Digital Equipment Corporation, the University of Manchester (England), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Colorado State University. The project's goals evolved to become: Define a general-purpose functional language that can run efficiently on conventional and novel parallel architectures; define a dataflow graph intermediate form independent of language and target architecture; develop optimization techniques for high-performance applicative computing;develop a thread management environment to support dataflow-style parallel computing on conventional shared-memory multiprocessors; achieve sequential and parallel execution performance competitive with programs written in conventional languages; and validate the functional style of programming for large-scale scientific applications.