FURTHER RECORDS OF THE SINDH AWL-HEADED SNAKE, Lytorhynchus paradoxus (GUNTHER, 1875), FROM INDIA WITH NOTES ON ITS HABITAT AND NATURAL HISTORY

This paper presents additional distributional records of the Sindh awl-headed snake Lytorhynchus paradoxus from India, along with scale counts, measurements and natural history observations of this poorly known species.

PolyGLoT: A Polyhedral Loop Transformation Framework for a Graphical Dataflow Language

Polyhedral techniques for program transformation are now used in several proprietary and open source compilers. However, most of the research on polyhedral compilation has focused on imperative languages such as C, where the computation is specified in terms of statements with zero or more nested loops and other control structures around them. Graphical dataflow languages, where there is no notion of statements or a schedule specifying their relative execution order, have so far not been studied using a powerful transformation or optimization approach. The execution semantics and referential transparency of dataflow languages impose a different set of challenges. In this paper, we attempt to bridge this gap by presenting techniques that can be used to extract polyhedral representation from dataflow programs and to synthesize them from their equivalent polyhedral representation. We then describe PolyGLoT, a framework for automatic transformation of dataflow programs which we built using our techniques and other popular research tools such as Clan and Pluto. For the purpose of experimental evaluation, we used our tools to compile LabVIEW, one of the most widely used dataflow programming languages. Results show that dataflow programs transformed using our framework are able to outperform those compiled otherwise by up to a factor of seventeen, with a mean speed-up of 2.30x while running on an 8-core Intel system.

Forgotten records of Chrysopelea taprobanica Smith, 1943 (Squamata: Colubridae) from India

The colubrid snake Chrysopelea taprobanica Smith, 1943 was described from a holotype from Kanthali (= Kantalai) and paratypes from Kurunegala, both localities in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) (Smith 1943). Since its description, literature pertaining to Sri Lankan snake fauna considered this taxon to be endemic to the island (Taylor 1950, Deraniyagala 1955, de Silva 1980, de Silva 1990, Somaweera 2004, Somaweera 2006, de Silva 2009, Pyron et al. 2013). In addition, earlier efforts on the Indian peninsula (e.g. Das 1994, 1997, Das 2003, Whitaker & Captain 2004, Aengals et al. 2012) and global data compilations (e.g. Wallach et al. 2014, Uetz & Hošek 2015) did not identify any record from mainland India until Guptha et al. (2015) recorded a specimen (voucher BLT 076 housed at Bio-Lab of Seshachalam Hills, Tirupathi, India) in the dry deciduous forest of Chamala, Seshachalam Biosphere Reserve in Andhra Pradesh, India in November 2013. Guptha et al. (2015) further mentioned an individual previously photographed in 2000 at Rishi Valley, Andhra Pradesh, but with no voucher specimen collected. Guptha’s record, assumed to be the first confirmed record of C. taprobanica in India, is noteworthy as it results in a large range extension, from northern Sri Lanka to eastern India with an Euclidean distance of over 400 km, as well as a change of status, i.e., species not endemic to Sri Lanka. However, at least three little-known previous records of this species from India evaded most literature and were overlooked by the researchers including ourselves.