Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!hal!nic.MR.NET!eta!pwcs!ems!srcsip!shankar
From: shankar@src.honeywell.COM (Son of Knuth)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Content Addressible Memories
Message-ID: <13308@srcsip.UUCP>
Date: 12 Dec 88 18:40:40 GMT
References: <12371@srcsip.UUCP> <367@enint.Wichita.NCR.COM> <6694@pucc.Princeton.EDU>
Reply-To: shankar@wabasha.UUCP (Subash Shankar)
Organization: Honeywell Systems & Research Center, Camden, MN
Lines: 21

In article <6694@pucc.Princeton.EDU> EGNILGES@pucc.Princeton.EDU writes:
>In article <367@enint.Wichita.NCR.COM>, lpelleti@enint.Wichita.NCR.COM (Larry Pelletier) writes:
>>There was never a "popular" programming paradigm that could really take
>>advantage of content addressible memories.  Although some things could be
>>done, it really didn't help the concepts of data and code in languages such
>>as Fortran, Cobol, Pascal, or C.

That's probably correct with procedural languages, but how about languages
like Prolog or other logic languages?  I believe that the use of CAMs would 
lead to significantly greater performances then the use of the more
traditional indexing schemes for rule unification and retrieval, despite
problems with inherently sequential portions of the problem.  CAMs can also
be used for maintenance of the binding environments.

As far as procedural languages go, what we need is a language that supports
associative data structures (tables?), but perhaps this is a solution 
searching for a problem.  Then again, maybe it's a feature that was never
supported precisely because of the lack of CAMs.

>     Also, what about LISP?

How do CAMs help LISP?