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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, October 14 2012 @ 11:18 AM EDT |
Sorry but you are wrong. All instructions you mentioned manipulates symbols.
That you are not seeing it might be because you have banged your heads against
your self-erected walls too much.
Tear down these walls!
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Ian Al on Sunday, October 14 2012 @ 12:00 PM EDT |
No, I never said that.
I know what you are getting at, though. In the past, you have stated that the
Hlt instruction is not valid math. PolR pointed to a reference about lambda
calculus, which I could not possibly understand, to show that it is valid math.
Your list was,
Memory barriers (read barrier, write barrier, full barrier)
Hlt (non-deterministic "pause", on the intel platform).
Lock (bus locking, e.g. prevent others reading and writing for one instruction
cycle).
NoOp (do nothing for one instruction cycle).
These are all analogous to an algorithmic step in a math algorithm. The NoP does
not appear to me to do anything useful in math algorithms like my counting, but
it is still a valid step. I assume that they are used for timing, a delay to
permit the completion of parallel processing and a low energy idle instruction
in a processor.
If Turing got a fellow mathematician to run a parallel tape, and each
mathematician was allowed to read data from the other's tape, then one could see
an application for all of those instructions, including halt. Halt would be the
last step in the algorithm once the end result on the tape was visible.
---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: PJ on Sunday, October 14 2012 @ 12:13 PM EDT |
It's always good to keep the conversation
going. It doesn't matter who agrees or who
doesn't. Others will read what you write.
What matters in the end is to get it right.
This isn't about determining an outcome and
then writing to suit. So keep it up, please.
Whoever is right will be manifest in the end.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: jesse on Sunday, October 14 2012 @ 04:27 PM EDT |
It is an arithmetic operator in that it causes the program counter to increment
one step...
There are many uses of a no-op, mostly to cause the computation to wait a while
for another piece of data.
Used to use it a lot for certain types of interfacing, both between CPUs and
within a single CPU.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: scav on Monday, October 15 2012 @ 06:39 AM EDT |
In the mathematical notation of C.A.R Hoare's "Communicating
Sequential
Processes", (if I remember correctly) halt can be
expressed recursively as the
process:
STOPA = STOPA
where A
is the finite alphabet of symbols corresponding to
the instructions executable
by the processor.
But if you dispute that, then go ahead and patent all your
useful algorithms whose key inventive step is some use of
the hlt instruction
not taught by the prior art. :)
Or for that matter, use of any instruction
that was not
anticipated in its specification as a computation by the
designers of the CPU.
---
The emperor, undaunted by overwhelming
evidence that he had no clothes, redoubled his siege of Antarctica to extort
tribute from the penguins. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: soronlin on Tuesday, October 16 2012 @ 02:48 AM EDT |
It seems to me people are looking too deeply.
Mathematics clearly has a HLT instruction. Otherwise how do you know you have
finished?[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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