Janis Voigtländer. Much ado about two (pearl): A pearl on parallel prefix computation. In George C. Necula, Philip Wadler, editors, Proceedings of the 35th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, POPL 2008, San Francisco, California, USA, January 7-12, 2008. pages 29-35, ACM, 2008. [doi]
This pearl develops a statement about parallel prefix computation in the spirit of Knuth’s 0-1-Principle for oblivious sorting algorithms. It turns out that 0-1 is not quite enough here. The perfect hammer for the nails we are going to drive in is relational parametricity.