Structural computing is a computing philosophy in which structure is the primary abstraction on which system design and implementation is based. As opposed to traditional computing environment in which structure is seen as a special case of data, in structural computing environments, data is seen as a special case of structure. We have identified three major areas of implications of adopting a structural computing philosophy. This layer provides generic structure and structural computation models that can be tailored and extended by other programs. The HOSS computing environment layer consists of three different types of programs.
Behaviors provide arbitrary computation over structure.
Applications combine abstractions provided by Sprocs to present users with structure and structural computation models specific to a particular problem. The sets of Sprocs, behaviors, and applications are open. This is the secondary memory management component of the operating system layer. A prototype of the StructBase is available on this site.