Subject: Topics for discussion

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 92 09:39:44 -0500

I'll be sending a somewhat longer message later today with technical
comments on the proposals on the floor.  This one is simply to remind
the members of this list that the FORALL group is presenting its
proposal at the next HPFF meeting, and we need to have our work in
good shape by then.  I'll take responsibility for pulling together the
overall draft, but I'm not going to impose my views on the world.

As I see it, we have 5 tasks to do for the next meeting:
	1. Define a single-statement FORALL
		including semantics and constraints for function calls
		from a FORALL assignment
	2. Define a multi-statement FORALL (or explicitly choose not
		to have one)
	3. Define an INDEPENDENT assertion / directive, telling the
		compiler there are no nasty dependences in a program region
	4. Define LOCAL subroutines
	5. Define an ON clause
These do not form a 1-1 correspondence to the proposals made thus far:
	Guy Steele, David Loveman, and Marc Snir have all submitted
		proposals for single- and multi-statment FORALLs.  I
		see convergence happening on single-statment FORALLs,
		but not on multi-statement.
	Min-You Wu has proposed a modification to Guy Steele's
		INDEPENDENT directive.  There hasn't been a lot of
		discussion on it (I'm in favor of the idea, but the
		syntax looks more like parallel regions than what we
		want).
	Guy Steele and Marc Snir have made rather different proposals
		on LOCAL subroutines.
	I still haven't written up my ON clause proposal, but
		hopefully by this weekend...
So we have our work cut out for us.

Logistically, here's what I propose:

	1. Take Marc's single-statment FORALL proposal as the working
document in that area.  The major issue left unaddressed there is
semantics of function calls (maybe not "unaddressed", but certainly
"unmentioned").
	2. Take Marc's multi-statement FORALL proposal as the working
document.  I've got a number of technical comments against this one (see
message later today), but it's as good a stake in the ground as any
other.
	3. Take the INDEPENDENT section of Min-You's proposal as the working
document.  Based on comments at the last meeting, I think we have to
discard the reductions proposed there.
	4. Take Marc Snir's LOCAL proposal as the working document
there.  If possible, pass the intrinsics he mentions to the intrinsics
group.
	5. Beat up on Chuck if he doesn't propose an ON clause by
Monday.

All proposals are, of course, open to comments and counter-proposals
by anybody.  We can start pulling the "official" drafts together after
some more discussion, say around July 10.

	Chuck