An exercise in high level language architecture design

The semantic gap that separates programming languages from the machines on which programs are run, often resulting in poor execution efficiency, has become more of a problem with the advent of Ada, languages for artificial intelligence programming, and even Pascal-like and C-like languages, prompting research into the design of special-purpose, high-level-language-directed computer architectures. Some of the techniques used in the development of these architectures are surveyed. A base special-purpose architecture for Lisp is developed on the basis of the observed empirical properties of typical Lisp program execution.<>