The architecture of an ALGOL 60 computer implemented with distributed processors

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Abstract
In conventional computer systems, the computer hardware does not actually execute the user's source program. Instead, a software compiler and link editor transform the program into low level machine code which is executed by the hardware. This mapping from a high-level language to a von Neumann instruction set is a. Computationally costly because compilers and link editors are big and slow. b. Inefficient because the object code is generally poor. c. Error prone because compilers and link editors are difficult to design, debug, and maintain. Furthermore, diagnostic messages for execution errors (an arithmetic overflow for example) are either cryptic and require the user to be familiar with the machine language (i.e., a dump), or the object code generated must require considerable run time overhead to permit run time errors to refer back to the users source program (i.e., pointers and tables, etc.).

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