© 1970 by British Computer Society
A ring processing package for use with FORTRAN or a similar high-level language
Admiralty Research Laboratory, Teddington, UK
Many applications of a computer, particularly in engineering design, utilise relationships between blocks of data and require a facility for building and manipulating data structures which permit the expression of these associative relationships. This paper describes a software package that enables associative data structures to be represented in a computer store by means of rings of address pointers connecting blocks of data in an orderly manner. The package has been implemented on a KDF9 computer with a disc store operated by the Egdon 3 system. The software is written in machine code but by means of a set of small auxiliary routines operations may be carried out by calling FORTRAN subroutines. By this means manipulations of associative data occupying up to two million words may be included in FORTRAN programs. By writing different auxiliary routines the package could be used in ALGOL or another high level language. Implementation on another computer would not be difficult.
Received April 1969.