Re: Guidelines for instruction set design?

  <cyril.cressent@gmail.com> wrote:
> The initial question was about wether there were instructions, design
> rules or anything else that needed to be used in an instruction set if
> you wanted to easily use a high level language on your CPU (ie: easily
> port a compiler).


If you want to avoid headaches, stay compatible with these features
of modern systems that are so common we take them for granted:


        two's-complement arithmetic
        individually addressable characters
        8-bit characters
        16-, 32-, and 64-bit integers
        IEEE floating point representations
        ASCII character set


The C language doesn't require ANY of those, but the first two simplify
its implementation significantly. The rest of those are often assumed
(properly or not) by existing code, including compilers.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gregg Townsend Staff Scientist The University of Arizona
gmt@cs.arizona.edu Computer Science Tucson, Arizona, USA

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.