10.1 Basic Blocks
In simple English, a basic block is a sequence of statements whose first statement may have a label, the last statement is a Jump or Conditional Jump, and does not contain any other labels, Jumps or Conditional Jumps. That is, we can only enter at the beginning of a basic block and exit at the end. If you remember Structured Programming this was exactly the condition imposed on all the control constructs like SEQUENCE, IF-THEN-ELSE, WHILE-DO, FOR, REPEAT-UNTIL and SELECT-CASE, but here a lower level of control flow is being considered, in terms of Jump instructions only.
The concept of Basic Blocks is used to form what is known as Flow-graphs, wherein they appear as nodes. A flow-graph indicates which block can follow which ...
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