A DATAFLOW LANGUAGE (AVON) AS AN ARCHITECTURE DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE (ADL)

摘要

Avon is a dataflow graph language which insists single-assignment side-effect free paradigm. While it is an asynchronous system, the syn-chronicity is achieved by explicit events, thus allowing a sub-system to have local sychronization, while being globally asynchronous. A powerful facility in Avon is line filters where a predicate can be associated with input as well as output ports. These filters can screen values from the streams either at the source or at the sink. We demonstrate that a small subset of Avon allows us to describe a computer architecture of substantial complexity in a natural and intuitive setting.