A Performance Analysis of the Implementation of Addressing Methods in Block-Structured Languages

Variable accesses and scope rule enforcements represent a major part of the execution time of block-structured high-level language programs. The performance of a computer system largely depends on the implementation of the variable addressing mechanism. Several lexical level addressing mechanisms exist to reduce this overhead, including the well-known display mechanism and a proposal by Tanenbaum. The choice among these mechanisms is not trivial, and requires a careful performance analysis.