Re: Who invented the cactus stack?

mdp2 <M.D.Poole@ukc.ac.uk> wrote:
> Can anyone help me to locate a literature reference for the concept of
> a Cactus Stack?


hbaker@netcom.com (Henry Baker) writes:


>I don't know if they 'invented' it, but a popular reference is Bobrow &
>Wegbreit, Communications of the ACM, Oct. 1973.
>
>Some people call this 'spaghetti', rather than 'cactus'. (East Coast v.
>West Coast ??)




The Burroughs B6700 stack machine had hardwired support for Cactus
stacks; this was the foundation for the B6700's multitasking and
multiprocessor-ing. See "Computer System Organization: the
B5700/B6700 Series" by Elliot Organick, Academic Press, 1973.
Burrough's approach was probably home-grown, evolving out of the
multiprocessor aspects of their prior stack machines. The Organick
book relies heavily on a graphical notation that is equivalent to
cactus stacks, called Johnson contours. See "The Contour Model of
Block Structured Processes" by J.B.Johnson, SIGPLAN Notices 6(2)
pp55-82, Feb 1971, which is the proceedings of the Feb 1971 ACM
Symposium on Data Structures in Prog. Languages.
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