A proposal for a hardware text processor

ABSTRACT

Because of the tremendous growth in the terminal-oriented users community, software text editor is increasingly becoming a significant overhead for the computing systems. The files being manipulated by text editors are usually small but undergo rapid growth and development in its short-lived life-cycle. A look into the basic command structure of these text editors reveal that the operations performed by them fundamentally consist of pattern matching, pattern transformation, pattern deletion and insertion, and management of a set of counters and pointers. It is proposed in this paper that a specialized front-end processor with built-in string processing hardware provide a natural solution to the problem. This paper presents a possible architecture and logical capabilities of such a machine as an embellishment of microprocessors to be used for intelligent terminals. In the process, the structure of a general purpose non-numeric processor is evolved.

REFERENCES

• 1: Robert N. Noyce, "Microelectronics," Scientific American, vol. 237, no. 3, pp. 62-69, Sept. 1977.
• 2: Amar Mukhopadhyay, Hardware algorithms for nonnumeric computation, Proceedings of the 5th annual symposium on Computer architecture, p.8-16, April 03-05, 1978 [doi>10.1145/800094.803021]
• 3: M. J. Foster & H. T. Kung, "The Design of Special Purpose VLSI Chips" Computer, vol. 13, no. 1, Jan. 1980, pp. 26-40.
• 4: George P. Copeland, String storage and searching for data base applications: Implementation on the INDY backend kernel, Proceedings of the fourth workshop on Computer architecture for non-numeric processing, p.8-17, August 01-04, 1978, Blue Mountain Lake, New York, United States [doi>10.1145/800128.804162]
• 5: L. A. Hollaar, "Text Retrieval Computers" Computer, vol. 12, no. 3, March 1979 pp. 40-52.
• 6: Amar Mukhopadhyay, "Hardware Algorithms for String Processing" Technical Report No. CS-TR-42, Department of Computer Science, Univ. of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida. Feb. 1980.
• 7: 'XEDIT - Extended Text Editor' Control Data Corporation Publication No. 76071-000, 1977.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.1 PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURES

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Microprocessor/microcomputer applications

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.5 PATTERN RECOGNITION
      I.5.4 Applications
          Subjects: Text processing

General Terms:
Design