Languages for direct execution

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Abstract
The utility of a modern computing system lies in its capacity to perform a variety of transformations on input data under user control. In the earliest systems users exerted direct, low-level control, indicating the exact transformation to be applied to a data item manually at the time it was to be performed—in much the same manner as one now controls a small electronic calculator. With the passage of time, this user control medium has become much more sophisticated, culminating in the development of contemporary “high-level” user-oriented programming languages. The hardware used to implement these systems, however, has not yet reached correspondingly high levels of abstraction. This disparity has caused the implementation of modern computing systems to become increasingly complex—necessitating the evaluation of various time-space tradeoffs between different levels and/or types of processing. The long-term objective of the investigations described in this paper is to simplify the process of designing “good” systems, under the constraints imposed by contemporary technologies.

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