On implementing arbitrary precision arithmetic in NIL: an exercise in data abstraction

  • Authors:
  • Jim Purtilo

  • Affiliations:
  • Kent State University, Kent, OH

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGSAM Bulletin
  • Year:
  • 1980

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

NIL, currently under development at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, is the "New Implementation of Lisp" intended for the latest generation of large address space computers. This system is being developed in Lisp itself (following the successful pattern of the Lisp Machine Project at MIT), and among other goals, eliminates a few internal inconsistencies that still exist in Lisp constructions. More notably, NIL introduces a "typed data" method of representing information (doing away with older schemes which group together only data of one type on a given page, and then keep a table on what is on each page) and provides to the user primitives which may introduce to the environment novel data structures that are very efficiently handled by NIL.