The Design of Griffin: A Common Prototyping Language
Abstract
This project was the first phase of the development of a language for prototyping large software systems, especially those that will ultimately be implemented in Ada. The Department of Defense has made a commitment to the notion of rapid prototyping as a critical phase in software development that will result in more useful and reliable software systems and lower software maintenance costs. The success and cost-effectiveness of prototyping depends on, among other things, a prototyping language that demonstrates expressiveness, flexibility, and conciseness. Griffin, the language being designed in this project, in intended to meet this need. The Griffin project's approach to language design consists of integrating important language concepts exhibited in various modern programming languages, together with innovation in a number of areas important to large prototyping systems. Griffin features higher-order polymorphic functions, strong typing with type inference, a general tasking and communication facility, an object oriented programming facility, powerful datatypes (such as sets), and support for persistence and transaction based programming. Current efforts are concentrated on integrating the language features into a coherent, robust language design. In the following sections, we provide a brief technical description of some important aspects of Griffin, namely types, persistence, and concurrency.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1991
- Accession Number
- ADA251713
Entities
People
- Benjamin M. Goldberg
- Dennis Shasha
- Edmond Schonberg
- Malcolm Harrison
- Robert Dewar
Organizations
- New York University