The structure of directly executed languages: a new theory of interpretive system design

[摘要] This paper concerns two important issues in the design of optimal languages for direct execution in an interpretive system: binding the operand identifiers in an executable instruction unit to the arguments of the routine implementingthe operator defined by that instruction; and binding operand identifiers to execution variables. These issues are central to the performance of a system both in space and time. Historically, some form of "machine language" is used as the directly executable medium for a computing system. These languages traditionally are constrained to a single "n-address" instruction format; this leads to an excessive number of "overhead" instructions that do nothing but move values from one storage resource to another being imbedded in the executable instruction stream. We propose to reduce this overhead by increasing the number of instruction formats available at the directly executed language level. Machine languages are also constricted with respect to the manner in which operands can be "addressed" within an instruction. Usually, some form of indexed base-register scheme is available, along with a direct addressing mechanism for a few, "special" storage cells (i.e., registers and perhaps the zeroth page of main store). We propose a different identification mechanism--based on the Contour Model of Johnston. Using our scheme, only N bits are needed to encode any identifier in a scope containing less than 2**N distinct identifiers. Together, these two results lead to directly executed language designs which are optimal in the sense that: (1) k executable instructions are required to implement a source statement containing k functional operators; (2) the space required to represent the executable form of a source statement containing k distinct functional operators and v distinct variables approaches F*k + N*v -- where there are less than 2**F distinct functional operators in the scope of definition for the source statement, and less than 2**N distinct variables in this scope. (3) the time needed to execute the representation of a source statement containing k functional operators, d distinct variables in its domain, and r distinct variables in its range approaches d + r + k ; where time is measured in memory references.

[学科分类] 计算机科学（综合）