more talking to the press.

This instruction is especially useful, as it allows the software to directly implement an NFA (nondeterministic finite automaton) without having to transform it into a DFA (deterministic). NFAs are used for regular expression matching and lexical analysis, but the transformation to a DFA as needed on processors without the BBW instruction can be expensive in both time and memory. On a more serious note, many state-of-the-art processors do sort of implement "branch both ways" in the sense that they do speculative execution of both paths then discard the results on one path once the condition is resolved. A limited form of speculative execution was used by the IBM 7030 Data Processing System (AKA "Stretch"), introduced in 1961. I'm not aware of any other production systems with speculative execution that are on-charter for this list (e.g., introduced before 12-nov-1993). Eric