EXPERIMENTS IN DIFFUSED COMBINATOR REDUCTION.

In recent years there has been a fair amount of interest both in using combinators to represent functional programs, and in using graph reduction as an underlying evaluation strategy. Combining these ideas within a single framework for an 'applicative architecture' is very appealing because: (1) the normally ubiquitous 'environment' is eliminated, (2) the evaluation strategy becomes very simple (amenable to VLSI), and (3) there is a great potential for parallelism. We have been exploring a model of diffused combinator reduction in which the reduction process is distributed 'by demand' among a network of closely-coupled processors. We have tested our ideas via simulation, with encouraging results.