Sequential Algorithms, Deterministic Parallelism, and Intensional Expressiveness

Abstract

We call language L1 intensionally more expressive than L2 if there are functions which can be computed faster in L1 than in L2. We study the intensional expressiveness of several languages: the Berry-Curien programming language of sequential algorithms, CDS0, a deterministic parallel extension to it, named CDSP, and various parallel extensions to the functional programming language PCF. The paper consists of two parts.