Hardware Algorithms for Nonnumeric Computation

This paper is concerned with the design of hardware algorithms for nonnumeric computation. The subset of nonnumeric operations considered is derived from string processing languages such as Snobol or high-level database languages used in database management architectures. Being uniformly structured, the hardware could be implemented using LSI technology yielding an estimated pattern matching rate of about 100 million characters/s. The proposed nonnumeric processor will find applications in the environment of parallel (or associative) database management architectures, processing of large unstructured textual files, as a stand-alone microprocessor in digital communications which need simple search and update operations, or as a nonnumeric CPU that can be used along with the conventional CPU to expedite string processing operations.