Hermes
<language> An experimental, very high level, integrated language and system from the
IBM Watson Research Centre, produced in June 1990.
It is designed for implementation of large systems and distributed applications, as well as for general-purpose programming.
It is an imperative,
strongly typed and process-oriented successor to
NIL.
Hermes hides distribution and heterogeneity from the programmer.
The programmer sees a single
abstract machine containing processes that communicate using calls or sends. The
compiler, not the programmer, deals with the complexity of data structure layout, local and remote communication, and interaction with the
operating system.
As a result, Hermes programs are portable and easy to write.
Because the programming paradigm is simple and high level, there are many opportunities for optimisation which are not present in languages which give the programmer more direct control over the machine.
Hermes features threads, relational tablesHermes is, typestate checking,
capability-based access and dynamic configuration.
Version 0.8alpha patchlevel 01 runs on
RS/6000, Sun-4, NeXT, IBM-RT/{BSD4.3} and includes a bytecode compiler, a bytecode->C compiler and run-time support.
0.7alpha for Unix (ftp://software.watson.ibm.com/pub/hermes).
E-mail: <
[email protected]>, Andy Lowry <
[email protected]>.
Usenet newsgroup: news:comp.lang.hermes.
["Hermes: A Language for Distributed Computing".
Strom, Bacon, Goldberg, Lowry, Yellin, Yemini.
Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
1991.
ISBN: O-13-389537-8].
