baskett@decwrl.UUCP (Forest Baskett) (03/02/84)
One of the most successful stack machines has been the Mesa machine. It is moderately well described in four papers in the Proceedings of the Symposium on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, March 1-3, 1982, which came out later as an issue of both Computer Architecture News and as an issue of Sigplan Notices. One paper was "An Overview of the Mesa Processor Architecture" by John Wick. The second was "Static Analysis of the Mesa Instruction Set" by Dick Sweet and Jim Sandman. The third was "An Analysis of a Mesa Instruction Set Using Dynamic Instruction Frequencies" by Gene McDaniel. The fourth was "Fast Procedure Calls" by Butler Lampson. Xerox Corporation now sells three different models of this machine in various forms. The Mesa machine achieves, to a remarkable extent, one of the usual advantages of stack machines, namely, high code density. It also suffers from one of the usual disadvantages of stack machines, namely, that a given program normally requires more instructions be executed than would be required on a register machine that was otherwise similar. Forest