Instruction Sequences for Computer Science

This book demonstrates that the concept of an instruction sequence offers a novel and useful viewpoint on issues relating to diverse subjects in computer science. Selected issues relating to well-known subjects from the theory of computation and the area of computer architecture are rigorously investigated in this book thinking in terms of instruction sequences. The subjects from the theory of computation, to wit the halting problem and non-uniform computational complexity, are usually investigated thinking in terms of a common model of computation such as Turing machines and Boolean circuits. The subjects from the area of computer architecture, to wit instruction sequence performance, instruction set architectures and remote instruction processing, are usually not investigated in a rigorous way at all.

Introduction. - Instruction Sequences. - Instruction Processing. - Expressiveness of Instruction Sequences. - Computation-Theoretic Issues. - Computer-Architectural Issues. - Instruction Sequences and Process Algebra. - Variations on a Theme. - Appendix A: Five Challenges for Projectionism. - Appendix B: Natural Number Functional Units. - Appendix C: Dynamically Instantiated Instructions. - Appendix D: Analytic Execution Architectures.