Reply To: The Belt

I was unfamiliar with your work and greatly appreciate you bringing it to my attention. Your thesis will take a bit for me to digest; please email me at ivan@millcomputing.com and I’ll comment when I have gotten through it. Unfortunately, research in Japan is not as well known here in the US as it should be; for that matter, the same is true of research from anywhere outside the US, due to some mix of language barrier, NIH, old boy networks, and perhaps arrogance.

As for your Queue Machines, it’s clear that stack machines, queue machines, and belt machines like the Mill are all members of a super-family of architectures in which transient results are single-assignment; the differences among stack, queue, and belt lies in the permitted/encouraged access pattern to use those transients. Perhaps systolic array machines may be thought of as belonging to this group too. The other great super-family, relaxing the single-assignment constraint, includes accumulator and general-register machines.

Thank you.