An overview of the mesa processor architecture

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the architecture of the Mesa processor, an architecture which was designed to support the Mesa programming system [4]. Mesa is a high level systems programming language and associated tools designed to support the development of large information processing applications (on the order of one million source lines). Since the start of development in 1971, the processor architecture, the programming language, and the operating system have been designed as a unit, so that proper tradeoffs among these components could be made.