Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In the x86 assembly language, the JMP instruction performs an unconditional jump. Such an instruction transfers the flow of execution by changing the program counter.There are a number of different opcodes that perform a jump; depending on whether the processor is in real mode or protected mode, and an override instruction is used, the instructions may take 16-bit, 32-bit, or segment:offset ...
An indirect branch (also known as a computed jump, indirect jump and register-indirect jump) is a type of program control instruction present in some machine language instruction sets. Rather than specifying the address of the next instruction to execute , as in a direct branch , the argument specifies where the address is located.
Example of branch table in Wikibooks for IBM S/360; Examples of, and arguments for, Jump Tables via Function Pointer Arrays in C/C++; Example code generated by 'Switch/Case' branch table in C, versus IF/ELSE. Example code generated for array indexing if structure size is divisible by powers of 2 or otherwise.
Programming languages impose different restrictions with respect to the destination of a goto statement. For example, the C programming language does not permit a jump to a label contained within another function, [2] however jumps within a single call chain are possible using the setjmp/longjmp functions.
In computer programming, assembly language (alternatively assembler language [1] or symbolic machine code), [2] [3] [4] often referred to simply as assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence between the instructions in the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. [5]
For example, a JE... (Jump if Equal) instruction in the x86 assembly language will result in a jump if the Z (zero) flag was set by some previous operation. A bit field is distinguished from a bit array in that the latter is used to store a large set of bits indexed by integers and is often wider than any integral type supported by the language.
A function may contain multiple epilogues. Every function exit point must either jump to a common epilogue at the end, or contain its own epilogue. Therefore, programmers or compilers often use the combination of leave and ret to exit the function at any point. (For example, a C compiler would substitute a return statement with a leave/ret ...
For compilers generating assembly directly, tail-call elimination is easy: it suffices to replace a call opcode with a jump one, after fixing parameters on the stack. From a compiler's perspective, the first example above is initially translated into pseudo- assembly language (in fact, this is valid x86 assembly ):