The SECD machine is a highly influential virtual machine and abstract machine intended as a target for functional programming language compilers. The letters stand for Stack, Environment, Code, Dump, the internal registers of the machine. These registers point to linked lists in memory.
The machine was the first to be specifically designed to evaluate lambda calculus expressions. It was originally described by Peter J. Landin as part of his ISWIM programming language definition in 1963. The description published by Landin was fairly abstract, and left many implementation choices open (like an operational semantics). Hence the SECD machine is often presented in a more detailed form, such as Peter Henderson's Lispkit Lisp compiler, which has been distributed since 1980. Since then it has been used as the target for several other experimental compilers.
In 1989 researchers at the University of Calgary worked on a hardware implementation of the machine.
Read more about SECD Machine: Registers and Memory, Instructions
Famous quotes containing the word machine:
“The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)