Efficient annotated terms

How do distributed applications exchange tree‐like data structures? We introduce the abstract data type of Annotated Terms (ATerms), and discuss their design, implementation and application. A comprehensive procedural interface enables the creation and manipulation of ATerms in C or Java. The ATerm implementation is based on maximal subterm sharing and automatic garbage collection. A binary exchange format for the concise representation of ATerms (sharing preserved) allows the fast exchange of ATerms between applications. In a typical application – parse trees which contain considerable redundant information – less than two bytes are needed to represent a node in memory, and less than two bits are needed to represent it in binary format. The implementation of ATerms scales up to the manipulation of ATerms in the giga‐byte range. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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