Sat, 20 Jan 2007, by [EMAIL PROTECTED]: > > 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
