5 Apr
2006
5 Apr
'06
10:50 a.m.
On 4/5/2006 at 7:35 PM Sebastian Br?ckner wrote:
And the really weird ideas... like storing the return
address in the
first word of a subroutine.
That one goes way back before the PDP-8. Even before CALL instructions,
one of the standard ways was to store the return address in a jump
instruction at the front of the subroutine being called.
Here's an example for the CDC 160A:
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cdc160/man/jump.html
So it was pretty natural that machines would eventually implement the
sequence in hardware. The CDC 6000/7000 PPU, which is the direct descended
of the 160A did just that.
Who needs all of those fancy instructions, anyway?
Cheers,
Chuck