Actionable Data Strutures and the New IF-THEN | Cogswell Cogs, Centipedes, And Stop Structures | CABOOSE Aside

Team. We are continuing our background reading on Bean Validation (BV), Context Dependency Injection (CDI), plus making another pass of the fundamentals in the JAVA Standard Edition Tutorial (https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/) for review.

Cogs from a Centipede

While doing this reading, some more thoughts on the possible behaviors for actionable data structures have arisen. We mentioned in an earlier note that a pair of cooperating circular queues could mimic a traditional for, while..do, or repeat..until structure without requiring any conditional branching and pipeline stalls. A pair of such cooperating queues would rotate upon one another like cogs in a mechanical timepiece. This would produce infinite repetition, and would likely be very rapid since it would not necessitate flushing the instruction pipeline on an erroneous branch prediction. Earlier, we labelled such a structure a centipede since the action of the data structure conjured up images of an 1980s video game of the same name.

Jane Stop This Crazy Thing

What we now need are stop structures. This is achievable with an actionable map whose get-key method results in the invocation of behavior. Such a map would hold a pair of action-sets associated with conditional truth values. On get( true-condition ) or on get( false-condition ), the resulting actions would permit the continuance of the iteration or halt it. Such a map would simulate an IF-THEN which always calculated the proper offset of the next action-set without branch prediction.


Buyer Beware

Much of these notions on Actionable Data Structures (ADS) are speculation with limited testing.

Enjoy This Upcoming Week. More will be coming in terms of CABOOSE source soon.

The CABOOSE Team.