Re: Fat references

On Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:57:25 GMT, anton@a4.complang.tuwien.ac.at
(Anton Ertl) wrote:


>glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> writes:
>>In comp.compilers Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
>>> Yes, 16 bits were called a word on such 8-bit processors (there was
>>> another name for 8-bit units: byte), and it was commonly needed,
>>> because these machines used 16 bits for addressing their 64KB address
>>> space.
>>
>>But not quadword and octoword.
>
>Sure, but once they had used "word" for 16 bits, they apparently had
>no fantasy left for names of larger units (hmm: phrase, sentence,
>paragraph; at least "line" and "page" are used:-).


Intel used the term "paragraph" to refer to the 16-byte blocks
addressed by 8086 segment registers. The so-called "huge" address
mode used a standard format:(segment * 16) + (offset % 16), in which
the segment selected the paragraph and the offset the byte within. It
enabled pointers to be value compared easily and eliminated the issue
of pointers having different segment and offset values referring to
the same memory location.


George

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