List Processing Primitives for Parallel Computation

A new model of list processing is proposed which is more suitable as a basic data structure for architecture-independent programming languages than the traditional model of lists. Its main primitive functions are: concatenate, which concatenates two lists; split, which partitions a list into two parts; and length, which gives the number of elements in a list. This model contains a degree of non-determinism which allows greater freedom to the implementation to achieve high performance on both parallel and serial architectures.