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A comparison of instruction sets for stack machines
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Source Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing archive
Proceedings of the ninth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing table of contents
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Pages: 132 - 142  
Year of Publication: 1977
Authors
Sponsors
ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGACT: ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory
Publisher
ACM  New York, NY, USA
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Downloads (6 Weeks): 5,   Downloads (12 Months): 16,   Citation Count: 3
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ABSTRACT

Suppose you are approached by a computer designer who wants to select a machine architecture and instruction set that is desirable from a compiler writers standpoint. What would you recommend, and why? We give a limited answer to the above question. We focus on the computation of arithmetic expressions like a−b+c. When computing a−b we need different instructions depending on where a and b are to be found. On a programmable calculator for example, a or b may be on the stack, or stored in some memory register. We also need instructions that copy values from one place to another. Algorithms that generate code for arithmetic expressions tend to treat general purpose registers as a stack. Moreover, results about machines that perform all arithmetic in a hardware stack are directly applicable to machines with general purpose registers. We therefore start our study of instruction sets by looking at stack machines. We compare machines based on the number of instructions needed to compute a given expression. We then turn to algorithms that generate optimal programs for computing expressions on the various machines.


REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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Burroughs corporation, Burroughs B6700 Information Processing Systems, Reference Manual (1969).
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Hewlett-Packard Company, HP-65 Owner's Handbook (July 1974).
 
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D. E. Knuth, An empirical study of Fortran programs, Software-Practice and Experience 1 (1971) 105-133.
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Collaborative Colleagues:
Bhaskaram Prabhala: colleagues
Ravi Sethi: colleagues