Semantics of a Functional BSP Language with Imperative Features

The Bulk Synchronous Parallel ML (BSML) is a functional language for Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) programming, on top of the sequential functional language Objective Caml. It is based on an extension of the λ-calculus by parallel operations on a parallel data structure named parallel vector, which is given by intention. The Objective Caml language is a functional language but it also offers imperative features. This paper presents formal semantics of BSML with references, assignment and dereferencing. 1