[fpc-devel] System 370: Episode 3. Addressing and it's limits Part One!

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

steve smithers schrieb:

> Base / Displacement consists of a 16 bit value, the first 4 bits enumerate a
> register, and the other 12 bits hold a displacement from 0 to 4095. The actual
> or Effective address for each storage operand is calculated as the unsigned
> addition of the value held in the base register to the displacement from the
> instruction itself.

This reminds me of 8086 "real" mode, and 16 bit mode with (far) 
addresses splitted into segment:offset. Using an 16 bit compiler and 
syntax (near/far pointers and seg:off notation) would be easier to 
support a segmented-memory architecture. I also don't see right now how 
data structures > 4KB could be addressed, without subroutines to map 
virtual into physical (here seg:off) addresses.

When I had a first look at the 8086 CPU, decades ago, I didn't 
understand how to handle such a memory architecture in an compiler. Only 
when I came across the Microsoft compilers and their memory models, I 
saw how "hints" in the source code would allow an compiler to create 
efficient machine code. But all these syntax externsions have been 
stripped from nowadays compilers and languages, so that it will be very 
hard to support such a dinosaur architecture in an 32/64 bit compiler.

DoDi