Starlet and the APL Machines

Summary

A brief description of the STARLET computer concept as well as of the APL machines of Abrams and Marchal is given. STARLET, which is a hardware concept, is compared with the APL machines, which are software concepts for APL interpreters. It is shown that all three systems differ essentially in all pertinent details such as the internal information structure and its interpretation, the function and scope of descriptors, the accessing and processing of data. Furthermore, it is shown that the pseudo variable mechanism and the related condensation technique in STARLET is a unique method, by which similar goals can be accomplished as by Abrams’ beating and Marchal’s deferred value computation method. It will be seen that the combination of Abrams’ drag-along principle and the STARLET hardware organization would lead to a most efficient APL machine.