A New Stack Technique for the Management of Runtime Structures in
Distributed Environments

G. Hogen, R. Loogen

	   A new technique for the management of runtime structures in
	   distributed implementations is presented. Instead of storing
	   the runtime stacks of parallel processes as linked lists
	   of function blocks in a heap structure, the local stacks of
	   several parallel processes, which are executed on the same
	   processor element, are stored in an interleaved manner on
	   a single physical stack, called the {\em meshed stack}. The
	   technique originated from the stack organisation in the well
	   known Warren Abstract Machine (WAM) for logic languages, where
	   the runtime information of several alternative computation
	   branches is stored on a single stack. In principle, the meshed
	   stack technique is independent of the implemented language.
	   We will explain it for the parallel implementation of
	   functional languages. The new technique supports sequential
	   and parallel evaluations equally well.