Tagged architecture

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In computer science, a tagged architecture 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.

One notable series of tagged architectures were the Lisp machines, which had tagged pointer support at the hardware and opcode level.

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