LISP machine NK3 and measurement of its performance

  • Authors:

  • Makoto Nagao;Jun-ichi Tsujii;Katsuto Nakajima;Kei Mitamura;Hachidai Ito

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan;Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan;Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan;Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan;Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'79 Proceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 1979

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Abstract

A LISP machine NK3 is presented. The machine has various special hardwares not only for executing ordinary LISP programs very fast but also for implementing flexible control structures such as co-routines. Special care is taken in the architecture to realize rapid transfer of the pointer information in the system. Automatic management of the stack area and the guarantee of high speed and flexible stack operations are the other important design issues. NK3 is provided with a hardware stack which contains the top part of the stack and transfers data from/to the main memory independently with the CPU. Various instructions for manipulating the stack, such as exchange the stack content, etc., are prepared. The constructions of the hardware architecture micro/macro instruction sets, and the software including the interpreter are described in this paper. Some results of performance evaluation are also shown.