Two-Stage Programming

Introduction Imperative programming is commonly used in scientific computing. It offers the advantage of performance but has also considerable drawbacks. The most important one is the explicit store management. It is based on the reuse of stores by destructive assignments. This is essential for performance, but is also one of the most important sources of programming errors. In addition, parallel/distributed imperative programming encompasses the mixture of the description, decomposition, and distribution of computations, and processor communications. This mixture is another source of errors and makes the development of programs highly involved. Functional programming has begun to be seen as an alternative since computations are naturally expressed by recursive function definitions, which are very close to their mathematical description. This idea is used in the programming languages Crystal 1 and EPL 2 and array comprehensions in Haskell<F