Measurements of the virtual memory demands of Algol-60 programs (Extended Abstract)

Programming languages such as Algol-60 use block structure to express the way in which the name space of the current environment, in the contour model (1) sense of that word, changes during program execution. This dynamically-varying name space corresponds to the virtual memory required by the process during its execution on a computer system. The research to be presented is an empirical study of the nature of the memory demands made by a collection of Algol-60 programs during execution. The essential characteristics of any such resource requiest are the amount of memory requested, and the holding time for which the resource is retained and these distributions will be presented for several components of the virtual memory required by the Algol programs.