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reduced source statements (versus repetitive If statements) reduced requirement to test return codes individually (if used at call site to determine subsequent program flow) Algorithmic and code efficiency (data need only be encoded once and branch table code is usually compact), and the potential to attain high data compression ratios. For ...
Continuation at a different statement (unconditional branch or jump) 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 ...
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 ...
Unconditional branch instructions such as GOTO are used to unconditionally jump to a different instruction sequence. If the algorithm requires a conditional branch, the GOTO (or GOSUB subroutine call) is preceded by an IF-THEN statement specifying the condition(s).
A combination of state variables and structured control, notably an overall switch statement, can allow a subroutine to resume execution at an arbitrary point on subsequent calls, and is a structured alternative to goto statements in the absence of coroutines; this is a common idiom in C, for example.
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.
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.
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.