Alan Kay wrote:
>>The designs that I *am* working on are optimized for Smalltalk. The
>>current 16 bit version (http://www.merlintec.com:8080/Hardware/Oliver)
>>essentially has a vast table of all class/selector combinations.

>We called this the "giant hash table scheme" at PARC and thought
>about using some (future) VM hardware to look up this more useful
>virtual address for methods.
>
>I'd love to hear how this works out (and what kinds of HW would do it
>better (like a specially programmed FPGA, etc.).

Wouldn't Content Addressable Memory (CAM) work for this?  I can
remember reading about this years ago, and I know that some current
network routers and switches use this to speed up their table lookups.