Tagged architecture
Edward F. Gehringer, J. Leslie Keedy · ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News · 1985
Traditionally, instruction sets have included separate instructions for manipulating different data types, such as integers and real numbers.A long-discussed but seldomimplemented alternative has been tagging, where the type information is stored adjacent to the data itself, rather than being inferred from the instructions.Over the years, several advantages have been claimed for tagging, including improving program reliability, saving memory, and facilitating a high-level language architecture.For computers that are not specifically oriented toward dynamically typed languages, we show that tagging fails to achieve these advantages completely, and that most of 'them can be better achieved by extensions of other mechanisms.