Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

A storage structures formalism is described which can be used as a precise symbolic representation of low-level storage organizations and also as a description of storage requirements to a storage allocation mechanism. The formalism is based on three forms of memory management (sequential, linked, and associative) and associated referencing mechanisms (indexing, pointing, and hashing). Several examples of the formalism are presented. The meaning, or interpretation, of a storage structure as used to implement a modelling structure is discussed. Examples of alternative implementation structures (storage structures and their interpretations) for a particular modelling structure are presented.