A model of a microprogrammed functional-oriented computing unit

Computing physics is a discipline of computer science the aim of which is to model automatic computing. The basic idea is to use a collection of formal theories for describing mechanisms and reasoning about them scientifically, while formulating the problems to be used as design specifications by means of new functions and, in general, new conceptual and formalizable tools. A design problem must be formulated to define the desired solution as a compound expression, prove that it describes the computation to be designed for all possible cases and input data, and derive the corresponding mechanism. The authors present a case for which it is possible to specify compound expressions and their corresponding mechanisms. It concerns the modeling of a computing unit for the AFP functional language. The paper shows (1) the data structure suitable to represent AFP programs and their reduction, and (2) how from AFP program definition it is possible to derive the model of a computing unit performing arithmetic operations, of more than elementary complexity