List space

The Nodes are relatively high-level structures and at runtime within the peer-nodes they sit upon a more fundamental layer called list space in which the actual nodal change takes place in a peer.

List items

The project uses a very fundamental memory model based on binary sequences. The entire memory can be divided into groups of smaller sequences which can themselves each be referred to by a locally unique binary sequence. For example, a 16 megabyte section of RAM can be divided into two million 64-bit sequences. List-space uses blocks of binary as its local memory resource and divides the block up into smaller binary sequences called list items. Every list-item holds the same structure of content which is a sequence of three list-item-keys, even an "empty" list-item containing all zero's is interpreted as containing three list-item-keys all referring to the first list-item in the list-space.

List item keys

Since binary can be treated as numbers, each of the two million sequences in the example above can itself be referred to, or addressed, by a unique binary sequence called a list-item-key. In the case of two million items, the list-item-keys are 21 bit sequences. In other words, a 16MB list-space is divided into two million list-items each formed from three 21-bit list-item-keys. The slight inefficiency of wasting one out of every 64 bits is done because of increased efficiency gained from working with sizes which are powers of two.

Three keys

There are a number of ways that list-items can be linked together to form lists and binary-trees which are all constructed from this general "three-slot" data structure, such as stacks, queues and axes. List-space uses a generic loop linking system for handling whats in use and what's free, but the main functionality of list-space which is the foundations for Nodal Reduction is binary traversal.

Within each of the three keys common to all list-items, the first and second are used for binary traversal which allows list-item-keys to be used as associations (see key-as-reference for more details on this concept). The last key is context specific and represents a value at the end of an association, but both the association-key and the association-value are list-item-keys, references to other list-items.

List-space methods;

List-space is an environment which offers a generic set of methods which can manipulate a space of list-items, each addressable by a binary list-item-key. Each list-item is composed of three list-item-keys. This simple model is rich enough to support many kinds of higher data structures such as stacks, queues, threads, loops and trees.

• listInsert()
• listRemove(subject)
• listTraverse(subject, object)
• listGetValue(subject)
• listSetValue(subject, value)
• listGetKeys(subject)

See also

• list-space.c - current implementation