abstract machine

(language)

A processor design which is not intended to be implemented as hardware, but which is the notional executor of a particular intermediate language (abstract machine language) used in a compiler or interpreter. An abstract machine has an instruction set, a register set and a model of memory. It may provide instructions which are closer to the language being compiled than any physical computer or it may be used to make the language implementation easier to port to other platforms.

A virtual machine is an abstract machine for which an interpreter exists.

Examples: ABC, Abstract Machine Notation, ALF, CAML, F-code, FP/M, Hermes, LOWL, Christmas, SDL, S-K reduction machine, SECD, Tbl, Tcode, TL0, WAM.

abstract machine

(theory)

A procedure for executing a set of instructions in some formal language, possibly also taking in input data and producing output. Such abstract machines are not intended to be constructed as hardware but are used in thought experiments about computability.

Examples: Finite State Machine, Turing Machine.

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)

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References in periodicals archive

Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS uses GIS technology to analyze and visualize literary and historical texts, drawing unusual connections between GIS methods and how they can be applied to mapping language patterns for greater insights that lend to better critical analysis.

Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS

Moreover, and importantly, they illuminate the construction and articulation of the "abstract machine." From their ruminations, we can ascertain that machines emerging from the machinic phylum, that is to say the technological lineage of machines, may in some circumstances compromise the "processual opening" of plastic and incorporeal universes of references in semio-capitalism.

The Zerrissenheit of subjectivity

In this introductory essay I will consider a range of possible answers to the question, considering the status of neoliberalism as an aggregation of ideas, a discursive formation, an over-arching ideology, a governmental programme, the manifestation of a set of interests, a hegemonic project, an assemblage of techniques and technologies, and what Deleuze and Guattari call an 'abstract machine'.

What kind of thing is 'neoliberalism'

This process, as explicated in Deleuze and Guattari's theorization of European racism, is originated by the abstract machine of faciality (visageite), which they argue 'never detects the particles of the other ...

Fanta-sizing culture: Italian soda pop, neocolonial Hawai'i and the global facialization machine

In addition, some Western Communists responded as warmly to abstract machine art as Read.

Herbert Read, organicism, abstraction and an anarchist aesthetic

Bell offers a useful examination of the notion of an 'abstract machine', the concept on which Deleuze builds his philosophy at the 'edge of chaos'.

Jeffrey A. Bell: Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference

The abstract machine in itself is destratified, deterritorialized; it has no form of its own (much less substance) and makes no distinction within itself between content and expression, even though outside itself it presides over that distinction and distributes it in strata, domains, territories.

Becoming transnational and becoming machinery in Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seamen

In Section 3.1 we define an intermediate model using an abstract machine called the [MATHEMATICAL EXPRESSION NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].

A Provably Time-Efficient Parallel Implementation of Full Speculation

A completely different approach fits the C++ abstract machine even better by defining an abstract datatype called an iterator that represents a place in a container.

Idiomatic design