CHAPTER5
A Closer Look at Instruction Set Architectures
Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one instruction—from which, by induction, one can deduce that every program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn’t work.”
—Anonymous
5.1 INTRODUCTION
We saw in Chapter 4 that machine instructions consist of opcodes and operands. The opcodes specify the operations to be executed; the operands specify register or memory locations of data. Why, when we have languages such as C++, Java, and Ada available, should we be concerned with machine instructions? When programming in a high-level language, we frequently have little awareness of the topics discussed in Chapter 4 (or in this chapter) because high-level ...
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