PASC-HLL: An experience in design techniques for firmware and the supporting hardware

PASC-HLL design started from a study of the high-level language PASCAL which allowed the definition of a special purpose intermediate language. A new mechanism for pipe-lined execution of polish strings using a FIFO queue instead of a push-down stack [1] made possible the design of a pipe-lined architecture bit-slice computer for high level language called PASC-HLL [2]. That computer consists in five special purpose microprogrammed processors, each being involved in a special function (instruction fetch, operand fetch, execution of operators, local storage management, and memory access).