The FX-87 Interpreter

Abstract

The first implementation of the programming language FX-87, a polymorphic typed functional language based on a system for static program analysis, is described. This polymorphic effect system integrates type checking and side-effect analysis into a single framework and allows the automatic detection of parallelizable expressions at compile-time. In FX-87, every expression has two static properties: a type and an effect. Type and effect polymorphism permits the behavior of first-class procedures to be statically modeled. The integration of type and effect analysis has resulted in the first system that is able (by accurate modeling of the side-effects of procedure values and masking of unobservable effects in the heap) to detect a compile-time, parallelizable constructs in both functional and imperative programs.<>