Memory Theory: A narrative for the design of pointer memory
January 7th, 2018
Manifest Statement: Pointer memory is a fundamental context of computation. As such, it deserves its own axiomatic type system, so as to inform any other design which relies on it as a dependency.
At the C/C++ level, pointer memory is so fundamental to the construction of so many other data structures, it deserves its own clean design. Unfortunately, this is not the case: The history and the development of C was at a time when there were more restrictive hardware constraints, less restrictive security constraints, and before the time of emergent, ubiquitous, modern, programming language theories. Furthermore, the design of C was tethered or indexed to assembly language, and so memory constructs followed the underlying narratives of register machines. This is problematic as it does not translate to higher level narratives used in recent programming languages.
I declare, the missing narrative approach to cleanly designing minimalist memory is to divide such memory into the following layers of increasing complexity: bits, bytes, pointers, segments, hooks, links. For each layer, it is expected we devise a minimalist interface model which allows us to navigate and mutate the internal states of these memory constructs. Our minimalist interface model should be built from the basic symbols of memory: name, location, internal state. Finally, each layer is thus built on top of the previous layer, leading to our desired axiomatic type system.
Finally, I have already devised such a model, and reference it in my public repository of essays under the title: Axiomatic Pointer Memory.