Concepts and implementation of a virtual memory developments for business orientation

APL is a very powerful language especially adapted for the manipulation of very large arrays. It is generally implemented as an interpreter included in a general System. The great power of the APL System and the great size of the information on which it may work, need big computers and restrict the use of APL. We tried to find a memory management which permits the implementation of an optimized APL interpreter on a mini-computer. This report presents the most important classical ways of managing memory and explains the System developed on the MULTI-20 (Intertechnique). The memory management is based on the virtual memory principles with paging and segmentation. Two different size of pages are available: small ones and large ones which may work simultaneously and which optimize Input/Output and the use of auxiliary space. The other part of this report describes facilities for developing this language for users which are especially interested in business. We introduce generalized arrays, which suppress the concept of files. The files are only structured arrays and for the user it has no interest to know how to manage tapes or a disk. Everything seems for the user to be in the core memory. (author)