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The workspace : a string manipulation buffer in the ℙ𝕖𝕡 machine
The workspace buffer is the centre of the pep/nom virtual-machine and is analogous to an “accumulator” register in a cpu chip. All incoming and outgoing text data is processed through the workspace. All machine instructions either affect or are affected by the state of the workspace.
The workspace buffer is a buffer within the virtual machine of the stream parsing language. In this buffer all of the text transformation processed take place. For example, the commands clear, add, indent, newline all affect the text in the workspace buffer.
The workspace buffer is analogous to a processor register in a non-virtual cpu. In order to manipulate a value, it is generally necessary to first load that value into a cpu register. In the same way, in order to manipulate some text in the pep machine, it is necessary to first load that text into the workspace buffer. This can be achieve with the @get, @pop, @read commands.