Distributed Prograph

Prograph is a programming environment and language which has been available on the Apple Macintosh platform for more than 5 years. It provides a sophisticated application builder, together with a visual programming language, supported by a powerful program development environment. The programming language uses an object-oriented model for data abstraction and the logic is based on a dataflow model of computation, specified graphically. Graphical dataflow gives programmers a clear view of the potential for exploitation of concurrency and so the Prograph language appears to give some leverage for the programming of parallel or distributed systems. This still leaves many issues unresolved, however, since for example dataflow is usually associated with fine-grain parallelism, but expected target architectures are unlikely to support fine-grain parallelism efficiently. This paper discusses the preliminary investigation of the issues of Prograph and parallelism