Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!oodis01!uplherc!wicat!meph!gsarff
From: gsarff@meph.UUCP (Gary Sarff)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Content Addressible Memories
Message-ID: <00051@meph.UUCP>
Date: 15 Dec 88 16:36:42 GMT
Organization: WICAT Systems Inc. Orem, Utah (Engineering-R & D)
Lines: 13

In article <13308@srcsip.UUCP> shankar@src.honeywell.COM (Son of Knuth) 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.  Then again, maybe it's a feature that was never
>supported precisely because of the lack of CAMs.

The languages SNOBOL4,SPITBOL (and others of their relations) and the language
Icon all have associative tables as first class data structures, i.e. they
can be passed as arguments to functions, returned as results, assigned, 
compared, an entire table can be an element of a larger aggregate type such
as a field in a record, an array element etc.  CAM's sound ideal for this
since these languages pass around descriptors for these tables rather than
the tables themselves and the elements in the tables are also descriptors
that would fit into CAM memory locations.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad"
He who steals my core-dump, steals trash