Sat, 20 Jan 2007, by robin.listas@telefonica.net:
The Saturday 2007-01-20 at 11:26 +0100, Theo v. Werkhoven wrote:
Well, my instructors in the early '70's told me that a byte was analogous to "bite" -- not the smallest "bit" accessible, but smaller than the full-size "word" of most architectures of the time. And some architectures do allow you direct access to a bit.
Why only some? Aren't shift- and logical operations part of all CPU architectures?
That's not direct access to a bit, IMO. Direct access would be an operation that would load into a register a certain bit, or another that would compare directly to a certain bit in a byte in memory (in one op). I have never seen it, though.
That would be rather inefficient opcodes I think, and I can't think of any circumstance where that would be neccesary. Perhaps that's why you don't see it. Theo -- Theo v. Werkhoven Registered Linux user# 99872 http://counter.li.org ICBM 52 13 26N , 4 29 47E. + ICQ: 277217131 SUSE 9.2 + Jabber: muadib@jabber.xs4all.nl Kernel 2.6.8 + See headers for PGP/GPG info. Claimer: any email I receive will become my property. Disclaimers do not apply. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org