xerox An Overview Of The Mesa Processor Architecture 1982 free download

File name An_Overview_Of_The_Mesa_Processor_Architecture_1982.pdf

An Overview of the Mesa Processor Architecture Richard K. Johnsson John D. Wick Xerox Office Products Division 3333 Coyote Hill Road Palo Alto. California 94304 Introduction example of how the Mesa instruction set enables significant reductions in code size over more traditional This paper provides an overview of the architecture of the architectures. We will also discuss in considerable detail Mesa processor. an architecture which was designed to the control transfer mechanism used to implement support the Mesa programming system [4]. Mesa is a high procedure calls and context switches among concurrent level systems programming language and associated tools processes. A brief description of the process facilities is designed to support the development of large information processing applications (on the order of one million source also included. lines). Since the start of development in 1971. the processor architecture. the programming language, and the General Oveniew operating system have been designed as a unit, so that All Mesa processors have the following characteristics proper tradeoffs among these components could be made. which distinguish them from other computers: The three main goals of the architecture were: High Level Language - To enable the efficient implementation of a modular, high level programming language such as The Mesa architecture is designed to efficiently execute high level languages in the style of Algol, Mesa, and Mesa. The emphasis here is not on simplicity of the compiler, but on efficiency of the generated object Pascal. Constructs in the programming languages such as code and on a good match between the semantics of modules, procedures and processes all have concrete the language and the capabilities of the processor. representations in the processor and m