High-level Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Eden

Parallel and concurrent programming is commonly handled at a low level of abstraction. Even concurrent declarative languages which are especially appropriate for symbolic computation provide only primitive constructs for that purpose. In contrast, the functional concurrent language Eden is an extension of the lazy functional language Haskell by high level constructs for the explicit specification of dynamically evolving process systems. The paper contains a detailed investigation of the expressiveness of Eden. In particular, we study commonly used coordination constructs and show the modular design of concurrent systems by two case studies.