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[a] Branch (or branching, branched) may also refer to the act of switching execution to a different instruction sequence as a result of executing a branch instruction. Branch instructions are used to implement control flow in program loops and conditionals (i.e., executing a particular sequence of instructions only if certain conditions are ...
The Guarded Command Language (GCL) of Edsger Dijkstra supports conditional execution as a list of commands consisting of a Boolean-valued guard (corresponding to a condition) and its corresponding statement. In GCL, exactly one of the statements whose guards is true is evaluated, but which one is arbitrary.
Multiway branch is the change to a program's control flow based upon a value matching a selected criteria. It is a form of conditional statement.A multiway branch is often the most efficient method of passing control to one of a set of program labels, especially if an index has been created beforehand from the raw data.
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.
In the C programming language, Duff's device is a way of manually implementing loop unrolling by interleaving two syntactic constructs of C: the do-while loop and a switch statement. Its discovery is credited to Tom Duff in November 1983, when Duff was working for Lucasfilm and used it to speed up a real-time animation program.
Executing a set of statements only if some condition is met (choice - i.e., conditional branch) Executing a set of statements zero or more times, until some condition is met (i.e., loop - the same as conditional branch) Executing a set of distant statements, after which the flow of control usually returns (subroutines, coroutines, and ...
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.
Branch prediction attempts to guess whether a conditional jump will be taken or not. Branch target prediction attempts to guess the target of a taken conditional or unconditional jump before it is computed by decoding and executing the instruction itself. Branch prediction and branch target prediction are often combined into the same circuitry.