Nial: A candidate language for fifth generation computer systems

The anticipated fifth generation of computing systems presents many challenges. One of the more important is the challenge of designing languages suitable for describing the parallel computations which these systems will achieve. The new systems will outpace the expressive power of most existing languages. As the hardware components and AI techniques are developed to achieve the fifth generation, so must appropriate languages be created. Another view of the fifth generation is that it is to be distinguished from previous systems, in large part, by being language driven. That is, the abstraction of some functional language is to be the driving force behind the machine design, and that potential parallelism in the language should motivate parallelism in the machine.