CASE-a lazy version of an SECD machine with a flat environment

Author

Davie, Antony J T ; McNally, David J.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., St. Andrews Univ., UK

fYear

1989

fDate

22-24 Nov 1989

Firstpage

864

Lastpage

872

Abstract

CASE is an abstract machine which supports applicative programming and is a variation of Landin´s classical SECD machine (P.J. Landin, 1964). Its environment is organized in a novel way which makes variable access more efficient by removing the overhead of following a static chain or of setting up a display as in more conventional stack architectures. The CASE machine also has features allowing the execution of code to reflect lazy evaluation semantics. A description is given of the architecture of the machine, its operational semantics and code generated by a typical compiler for some sample programs. Also discussed are some optimizations made to facilitate efficient code generation on real hardware and some measurements of the efficiency of the machine

Keywords

automata theory; data structures; functional programming; CASE machine; abstract machine; applicative programming; classical SECD machine; code/argument/stack/register; conventional stack architectures; efficient code generation; flat environment; lazy evaluation semantics; operational semantics; optimizations; real hardware; static chain; typical compiler; variable access; Computer aided software engineering; Current measurement; Displays; Hardware; Program processors; Tree data structures;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

TENCON '89. Fourth IEEE Region 10 International Conference

Conference_Location

Bombay

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/TENCON.1989.177071

Filename

177071