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News

• OpenCL 1.1 ratified by The Khronos Group

  The Khronos Group has ratified OpenCL 1.1, a programming standard for parallel execution of tasks across multicore processors, the standards-setting organization said on Monday.

• Opinion: Can you change your default programming language?

  If you have more than one coder on your team, chances are you have standardised on a programming language. Whether it's C, Java or Python, people need to be able to read and write each other's code to do their work. The language was probably picked by some of the first coders in your team, or was based on an analysis of what was needed at the time.

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  An inteview with Brian Kernighan, co-developer of AWK and AMPL

  Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into interesting programming languages. In the past we have spoken to Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language, Don Syme, senior researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, who developed F#, Simon Peyton-Jones on the development of Haskell, Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experiences maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame and Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth.

• OpenCL technology may speed up 'Snow Leopard'

  A recently-approved technology standard should help software developers to tap the latent processing power of graphics chips and transform regular computers into veritable supercomputers -- at least for certain applications. Poised to take advantage of the technology first is Apple.