STARLET

Abstract

It is a well-acknowledged fact that the adequate structuring of data is as important as the adequate structuring of a program. The classical von Neumann - machine deals on the hardware level only with scalars and, therefore, provides no hardware support of any sort for the manipulation of more complex data structures. Some more recently developed concepts - all variants of Iliffe's Basic Language Machine -- provide some hardware support for structuring data in the form of trees. Contrastingly, in the STARLET concept to be discussed in this paper, the basic data structure is that of ordered sets (as given by strings and arrays). In the paper, the basic notions of this novel concept are introduced and discussed, especially the internal information structure which differs considerably from that of the von Neumann-machine or other concepts. This very idiosyncratic information structure has far-reaching consequences with respect to the hardware structure of the machine. Finally, a number of resulting features will be discussed and an attempt will be made to compare the computing power of STARLET with that of avon Neumann-machine with equally fast hardware.