Re: Emigration from Usenet [was: Re: PTD was the most-respected of the AUE regulars ...]

On 2024-08-07, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On 07 Aug 2024 15:04:21 GMT, Aharon Robbins wrote:
>

A CS professor I know told me this last week:
 
      I'm one of the very few that teach Systems. It amazes me that our
      PhD students almost all in AI have never heard of a program
      counter.

>
“Program counter” ... is that a von Neumann thing?

It's the thing that holds the address of the current instruction being
executed.

Effectively, CPU's operate like this loop here

  int pc=0;
  while (1) {
    execute_instruction (pc);
    pc++;
  }

After that, 'execute_instruction' can be thought of as a big conditional
statement that actually performs the task -- moving data between CPU
registers, reading from RAM, whatever.

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