On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 5:37 AM, Alan Kay <[email protected]> wrote:
> One of the things on his list was to read a book of papers that had been > gathered by (Stanley?) Fox from the UK. I recall that some of the papers in > this book were classics by Strachey and Landin on foundations of programming > languages, lambda calculus equivalents of Algol, etc. I recall that most of > the papers in this slim book were very good. > "Advances in programming and non-numeric computation" by Leslie Fox? Another book on his list was by Iliffe (who among other things was the > designer of the Rice University computer, an early one using "keywords" > which were called "Descriptors" on the -- even earlier -- B5000). This book > was about a new machine design of his. > I have mentioned this book before on this list [1]. It's called Iliffe's "Basic Machine Principles", and his hardware design was so-called the Basic Machine. There are two versions of the book. Incidentally, for an interesting historical perspective on the Basic Machine and why it failed, see [2] for the memories of one of Iliffe's colleague. Basic Machine Principles is basically an attack on the von Neumann Architecture and the use of base and limit registers to govern address space segmentation. Iliffe thought that programs themselves should know how to access their resources, and that they should only be allowed to access other programs resources through explicit communication, and that such communication the "obvious" solution to the von Neumann bottleneck. [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg01329.html [2] Scarrott, Gordon G. "From Torsional Mode Delay Lines to DAP". http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/CCS/res/res12.htm
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