Whither UCMPH?
Jonathan
jonathan at comp.vuw.ac.nz
Tue Nov 22 22:51:30 AEST 1988
Pyramid's machine architecture includes a variety of integer
compare instructions for signed and unsigned compares:
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Pyramid Compare insns |
| |
+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+
| Operand | Signed | Unsigned |
| size | mnemonic opcode | mnemonic opcode |
+-------------------+----------+--------+----------+--------+
| word (32 bit) | CMPW | 60 | UCMPW | 65 |
+-------------------+----------+--------+----------+--------+
| halfword (16 bit) | CMPH | 62 | ??? |
+-------------------+----------+--------+----------+--------+
| byte (8 bit) | CMPB | 61 | UCMPB | 66 |
+-------------------+----------+--------+----------+--------+
UCMPH (opcode 67) is conspicuous by its absence.
Why isn't it there? Is it elsewhere? [[we don't actually have an
up-to-date assembler manual; I do know the assembler barfs on the
mnemonic ``ucmph'' on our 90x running OSx 4.0. ]]
Any chance of getting it added before Pyramid implement their
architecture in hardware rather than microcode :-) ?
Not having a UCMPH causes the novice compiler writer (like me) much grief,
especially when using a smart table-driven compiler like GNU CC. I
know it's possible to kludge around this, but at the cost of
less-than-optimal signed-halfword compares.
Wasn't it Wirth who said that RISC should stand for Regular
Instruction Set Computer :-) ?
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