Programming Techniques: ASP—a ring implemented associative structure package

ABSTRACT

ASP is a general purpose Associative Data Structure Package in which an arbitrary number of data items and an arbitrary number of the relationships between these data items may be represented. A special picture language is described which has proved very useful for drawing ASP structures on paper. ASP structures are built and manipulated by means of a series of macro calls, which are outlined in the Appendix. Emphasis is on the philosophy of the system rather than a particular implementation, though sufficient information is included to enable the reader to produce his own implementation of ASP.

REFERENCES

• 1: McCARTHY, J., et al. LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1962.
• 2: Ivan Edward Sutherland, Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communication system (Outstanding dissertations in the computer sciences), Garland Publishing, Inc., New York, NY, 1980
• 3: FELDMAN, J. A. AND ROVNER, P. D. An associative processing system of conventional digital computers. Lincoln Lab., M.I.T., Lexington, Mass., 1967.
• 4: DAHL, O-J, AND NYGAARD, K. SIMULA. A language for programming and description of discrete event systems. Norwegian Computing Center, Oslo, Norway, 1967.
• 5: ROBERTS, L. G. Graphical Communication and Control Languages. Second Congress on the Information System Sciences. Spartan Books, New York, 1964, pp. 211-17.
• 6: Douglas T. Ross, The AED free storage package, Communications of the ACM, v.10 n.8, p.481-492, Aug. 1967 [doi>10.1145/363534.363546]
• 7: BROWN, P. J. ML/I User's Manual. 1st Ed. U. Math. Lab., Cambridge, England, July 1966.
• 8: MACCALLUM, K. J. C.A.D. group macro language, C.A.D.G. Document 6. U. Math. Lab., Cambridge, England, Jan. 1967.
• 9: LANG, C. A., AND BROWN, H. Systems Assembly Language- SAL. U. Math. Lab., Cambridge, England, Oct. 1967.
• 10: J. C. Gray, Compound data structure for computer aided design; a survey, Proceedings of the 1967 22nd national conference, p.355-365, January 1967, Washington, D.C., United States [doi>10.1145/800196.806005]
• 11: Ross, D. T. AED-O Programming Manual. Prelim. release. MIT, Cambridge, Mass., 1964.

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
associative, data structure, graphics, languages, list structure, modeling, ring structure lists, set