An association-based model of dynamic behaviour
Ian Piumarta · 2011
Dynamic programming languages seem to spend much of their time looking up behaviour associatively. Data structures in these languages are also easily expressible as associations. We propose that many, and maybe even all, interesting organisations of information and behaviour might be built from a single primitive operation: n-way associative lookup. A fast implementation of this primitive, possibly in hardware, could be the basis of efficient and compact implementations of a diverse range of programming language semantics and data structures.