Alef

Alef may refer to:

People

Other uses

See also

Alef (programming language)

Alef was a concurrent programming language, designed as part of the Plan 9 operating system by Phil Winterbottom of Bell Labs. It implemented the channel-based concurrency model of Newsqueak in a compiled, C-like language.

History

Alef appeared in the first and second editions of Plan 9, but was abandoned during development of the third edition.Rob Pike later explained Alef's demise by pointing to its lack of automatic memory management, despite Pike's and other people's urging Winterbottom to add garbage collection to the language; also, in a February 2000 slideshow, Pike noted: "…although Alef was a fruitful language, it proved too difficult to maintain a variant language across multiple architectures, so we took what we learned from it and built the thread library for C."

Alef was superseded by two programming environments. The Limbo programming language can be considered a direct successor of Alef and is the most commonly used language in the Inferno operating system. The Alef concurrency model was replicated in the third edition of Plan 9 in the form of the libthread library, which makes some of Alef's functionality available to C programs and allowed existing Alef programs (such as Acme) to be translated.

Alef (magazine)

Alef is a bimonthly culture magazine published in English and Arabic in Doha, Qatar.

History and profile

Alef was established in July 2013 by founder and then editor-in-chief Jack Thomas Taylor who started the magazine. It was launched at the Serpentine Galleries in London, as part of the Qatar-UK 2013 Year of Culture partnership.Alef concentrates on art and culture topics from the GCC region. The content is generally divided into country-specific and editorial sections: Touch, Speak, Taste, Listen, and See.

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