THE MEANDER LANGUAGE AND PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT

Explicit parallel programs are error-prone during coding and hard to understand. Apart from the complexity of parallelism, these problems stem partly from the fact that entirely text-based languages are not the best choice for describing parallelism. The linear order of text hides the parallel structure of a program. Graphical constructs case programming as well as understanding. We describe a hybrid programming language and the accompanying programming environment that integrates textual and graphical descriptions by clearly distinguishing sequential from parallel aspects. The Meander environment supports a wide range of programming steps and transforms hybrid programs into ANSI-C programs executable on transputer networks and workstation clusters. The major benefit is that program design, coding, mapping, and visualization can be done in one single formalism.