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A high-level language computer architecture (HLLCA) is a computer architecture designed to be targeted by a specific high-level programming language (HLL), rather than the architecture being dictated by hardware considerations. It is accordingly also termed language-directed computer design, coined in McKeeman (1967) and primarily used in the 1960s and 1970s. HLLCAs were popular in the 1960s and 1970s, but largely disappeared in the 1980s. This followed the dramatic failure of the Intel 432 (1981) and the emergence of optimizing compilers and reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architectures and RISC-like complex instruction set computer (CISC) architectures, and the later development of just-in-time compilation (JIT) for HLLs. A detailed survey and critique can be found in Ditzel & Patterson (1980).
John Kenneth Iliffe was a British computer designer who worked on the design and evaluation of computers that supported fine-grained memory protection and object management. He implemented, evaluated and refined such designs in the Rice Institute Computer, R1 (1958–61) and the ICL Basic Language Machine (1963–68). A key feature in the architectures of both machines was control by the hardware of the formation and use of memory references so that the memory could be seen as a collection of data objects of defined sizes whose integrity is protected from the consequences of errors in address calculation, such as overrunning memory pointers.
References
- ↑ The Memory Management Glossary: Tagged architecture
- ↑ Feustel, Edward A. (July 1973). "On the Advantages of Tagged Architecture" (PDF). IEEE Transactions on Computers : 644–656. Archived (PDF) from the original on May 23, 2013. Retrieved January 21, 2013.
- ↑ Feustel, Edward A. (1972). "The Rice Research Computer -- A tagged architecture" (PDF). Proceedings of the 1972 Spring Joint Computer Conference. American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS). pp. 369–377. Archived (PDF) from the original on September 24, 2015. Retrieved July 27, 2014.
- ↑ Thornton, Adam. "A Brief History of the Rice Computer 1959-1971". Archived from the original on February 24, 2008. Retrieved January 31, 2013. (mostly written in [or before] 1994, and archived by the Wayback Machine on a date indicated [by "20080224"] in the URL)