This thesis describes the Caliban language and its pilot implementation. It then continues by presenting extensions and improvements to the basic language. Implementation techniques for the improved language are discussed in relation to an implementation on the Fujitsu AP1000 distributed memory multiprocessor computer. Two application case studies together with some performance results are presented. Finally, there is a critical appraisal of the language and its approach.
Caliban has good support for general data and computation partitioning. It also aids software reuse with its ability to abstract common computational structures into higher order forms which are concretised at compile time by partial evaluation. However, there do remain some open issues relating to evaluation order control. Finally, Caliban can be implemented reasonably efficiently on standard parallel hardware.