A parallel variant of ML using skeletons being developed

(April 1994) as part of Tore Bratvold's PhD in the Department

of Computing and Electronic Engineering, Heriot-Watt

University, Edinburgh, UK. Programs are written in a subset

of Standard ML, and parallelism is extracted from the use of

certain higher-order functions. The SkelML compiler uses

profiling information together with skeleton performance

models to distinguish useful from non-useful parallelism. An

important feature is the ability to perform transformations

between skeletons to improve performance. Skeletons currently

supported are map, filter, fold, pipe (implicitly extracted

from function application) and various combinations of these.