Editing SISAL (section)

== History ==
SISAL was defined in 1983 by James McGraw et al., at the [[University of Manchester]], [[Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]] (LLNL), [[Colorado State University]] and [[Digital Equipment Corporation]] (DEC). It was revised in 1985, and the first [[Compiler|compiled]] [[implementation]] was made in 1986. Its performance is superior to [[C (programming language)|C]] and rivals [[Fortran]], according to some sources,<ref>Retire Fortran?: a debate rekindled, David Cann, August 1992, Communications of the ACM, Volume 35, Issue 8</ref> combined with efficient and automatic parallelization.

SISAL's name came from [[grep]]ping "sal" for "Single Assignment Language" from the Unix dictionary /usr/dict/words.

Versions exist for the [[Cray]] [[Cray X-MP|X-MP]], [[Cray Y-MP|Y-MP]], [[Cray-2|2]]; [[Sequent Computer Systems|Sequent]], [[Encore Computer|Encore Alliant]], DEC [[VAX|DEC VAX-11/784]], [[dataflow]] architectures, KSR1, [[Inmos]] [[Transputer]]s, and [[systolic array]]s.