8 Feb
2022
8 Feb
'22
12:12 a.m.
I don't agree. Skips aren't really any more
strange than
branches. We're talking assembler here anyway. There are bound to be
jumps all over the place always. Not really more spagetti in any
architecture compared to any other.
Oh a skip scenario is definitely spaghetti. SKIP nearly always ends up
being SKIP BRANCH or even SKIP BRANCH BRANCH, and the programmer has
less code structuring options for a SKIP than when building the sorts of
behaviors that would be coded as loops or conditional blocks in high
level code.
But, it _is_ more than a bit silly to try to apply anti-spaghetti
sensibility to assembler.
The probably more "ugly" thing in the PDP-8
is that you do self
modifying code very often.
The other pre-modern behavior in a lot of the older architectures is the
type of branch where you store the return address at the jump target
location, then start actual execution at target+1. It makes recursion
and multi-tasking difficult.
De