Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Content Addressible Memories
Message-ID: <869@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 15 Dec 88 21:59:05 GMT
References: <12371@srcsip.UUCP> <367@enint.Wichita.NCR.COM> <6694@pucc.Princeton.EDU> <13308@srcsip.UUCP>
Sender: news@quintus.UUCP
Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
Lines: 17

In article <13308@srcsip.UUCP> shankar@wabasha.UUCP (Subash Shankar) writes:
>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.

SAIL is just such a language.

I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned the CWI(*) monograph
"Associons and the Closure Statement" in this discussion.
Its topic is "if we had large fast associative memories, how might we
use them?"

I'm also surprised that no-one has mentioned CAFS, described in ICL Tech J.
ICL had several papers on using it; I think they used it in an expert system
for hardware diagnosis amongst other things.

(*) Well, the organisation is CWI now, but it was MC when this thing came out.