“Life is like an analogy” - Aaron Allston

  

Working for the past 6 years to build, grow, and sell SpectaReg, a tool for on-chip register management, I’ve discussed registers with a wide range of people. In explaining the underlying problem of registers and memory address mapping, whether the audience be technically lay or literate, I enjoy a good concrete analogy that people can relate to.

Here are some analogies that can be made for register management, each a potential topic for exploration in a future blog posting.

Register management has similarities to…

  • order management in a restaurant — synchronizing order info between many different workers, each using common info in different ways
  • building a house — different workers maintaining and working from a common blueprint, which may need to change or be revised over time
  • the human nervous system — millions of finely identifiable/controllable sensory inputs and motor outputs wired to the brain

Undoubtedly, there are many other analogies that could be made.  I hope readers can leave some comments with other ideas.