Hermes

language An experimental, very high level, integrated

language and system from the IBM Watson Research Centre,

produced in June 1990. It is designed for implementation of

large systems and distributed applications, as well as for

general-purpose programming. It is an imperative, stronglytyped and process-oriented successor to NIL.

Hermes hides distribution and heterogeneity from the

programmer. The programmer sees a single abstract machine

containing processes that communicate using calls or sends.

The compiler, not the programmer, deals with the complexity

of data structure layout, local and remote communication, and

interaction with the operating system. As a result, Hermes

programs are portable and easy to write. Because the

programming paradigm is simple and high level, there are many

opportunities for optimisation which are not present in

languages which give the programmer more direct control over

the machine.

Hermes features threads, relational tablesHermes is,

typestate checking, capability-based access and dynamicconfiguration.

Version 0.8alpha patchlevel 01 runs on RS/6000, Sun-4,

NeXT, IBM-RT/BSD4.3 and includes a bytecode compiler,

a bytecode-@#C compiler and run-time support.

0.7alpha for Unix.

E-mail: [email protected], Andy Lowry

[email protected].

Usenet newsgroup: news:comp.lang.hermes.

["Hermes: A Language for Distributed Computing". Strom,

Bacon, Goldberg, Lowry, Yellin, Yemini. Prentice-Hall,

Englewood Cliffs, NJ. 1991. ISBN: O-13-389537-8].

(1992-03-22)