Tagged architecture

In computer science, a tagged architecture^[1] is a particular type of computer architecture where every word of memory constitutes a tagged union, being divided into a number of bits of data, and a tag section that describes the type of the data: how it is to be interpreted, and, if it is a reference, the type of the object that it points to.

Two notable series of tagged architectures were the Lisp machines, which had tagged pointer support at the hardware and opcode level, and the Burroughs large systems which had a data-driven tagged and descriptor-based architecture.

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References

1. ^ The Memory Management Glossary: Tagged architecture