Ten15 is an algebraically specified

abstract machine An abstract machine is a computer science theoretical model that allows for a detailed and precise analysis of how a computer system functions. It is analogous to a mathematical function in that it receives inputs and produces outputs based on pre ...

. It was developed by Foster, Currie et al. at the

Royal Signals and Radar Establishment The Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) was a scientific research establishment within the Ministry of Defence (MoD) of the United Kingdom. It was located primarily at Malvern in Worcestershire, England. The RSRE motto was ''Ubique S ...

Malvern, Worcestershire Malvern is a spa town and civil parish in Worcestershire, England. It lies at the foot of the Malvern Hills, a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The centre of Malvern, Great Malvern, is a historic conservation area, which grew dra ...

, during the 1980s. It arose from earlier work on the

Flex machine The Flex Computer System was developed by Michael Foster and Ian Currie of Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern, England, during the late 1970s and 1980s. It used a tagged storage scheme to implement a capability architectu ...

, which was a capability computer implemented via

microcode In processor design, microcode (μcode) is a technique that interposes a layer of computer organization between the central processing unit (CPU) hardware and the programmer-visible instruction set architecture of a computer. Microcode is a laye ...

. Ten15 was intended to offer an intermediate language common to all implementations of the Flex architecture for portability purposes. It had the side effect of making the benefits of that work available on modern processors lacking a microcode facility. Ten15 served as an intermediate language for compilers, but with several unique features, some of which have still to see the light of day in everyday systems. Firstly, it was strongly typed, yet wide enough in application to support most languages — C being an exception, chiefly because C deliberately treats an array similar to a pointer to the first element of that array. This ultimately led to Ten15's development into TDF, which in turn formed the basis for ANDF. Secondly, it offered a persistent, write-only filestore mechanism, allowing arbitrary data structures to be written and retrieved without conversion into an external representation.

Historical note

Why 'Ten15'? Nic Peeling reports that during early discussions of the concepts of Ten15, it was agreed that this was important and should have a name - but what? Ian Currie looked up at the clock and said 'Why not call it 10:15?'

References

* {{Authority control Computer languages History of computing in the United Kingdom Malvern, Worcestershire Science and technology in Worcestershire Theory of computation

Historical note

See also

References