On 07/26/2012 12:29 PM, Robinson, Paul wrote:
Michael Eager wrote:
Word-oriented platforms which have byte-addressable memory seems be a
self-contradiction.
The PDP-10 (my first machine) was a 36-bit word-addressable machine.
It had a "byte pointer" format that could specify an arbitrary byte within a
word. So, there was a hardware-defined bit pattern to specify any given
byte in memory, and instructions that could load and store just that byte.
Nobody ever described the PDP-10 as byte-addressable, but you could
make a pedantic argument for it.
So were several Burroughs machines. None had byte addressable memory.
Each that I'm acquainted with (and many other architectures) have
instructions which will extract a sub-word value from an addressable unit.
DWARF describes data in terms of memory addressable units. Let's not
let contrived arguments confuse the issue.
--
Michael Eager [email protected]
1960 Park Blvd., Palo Alto, CA 94306 650-325-8077
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