By James J. Baker
Communications of the ACM,
December 1964,
Vol. 7 No. 12, Page 726
10.1145/355588.365134
Comments
Scanning text on a computer, as in forming word lists or editing, usually involves isolating and identifying certain characters or classes of characters. For example, if we scan text to form a list of words, the definition of “word” might be “everything between two blanks that isn't punctuation.” To program this, we must be able to identify a single character (blank) and a class of characters (punctuation). In a computer such as the 7090, where characters are numbers, we can put a character into an index register and index a table of transfers (one table-entry per character), thus getting to a section of code appropriate for handling that particular character. This is not natural for the 1401 because characters are not numbers and turning them into numbers is a bit clumsy. However, 1401 addresses are a combination of numbers and other characters, and we can use characters directly to reference certain addresses provided we can turn all characters (there are 64) into the 40 that are allowable in specifying an address.
The full text of this article is premium content
No entries found
Log in to Read the Full Article
Need Access?
Please select one of the options below for access to premium content and features.
Create a Web Account
If you are already an ACM member, Communications subscriber, or Digital Library subscriber, please set up a web account to access premium content on this site.
Join the ACM
Become a member to take full advantage of ACM's outstanding computing information resources, networking opportunities, and other benefits.
Subscribe to Communications of the ACM Magazine
Get full access to 50+ years of CACM content and receive the print version of the magazine monthly.
Purchase the Article
Non-members can purchase this article or a copy of the magazine in which it appears.
