Hacker's Delight

2-15. Double-Length Add/Subtract

Using one of the expressions shown on page 29 for overflow of unsigned addition and subtraction, we can easily implement double-length addition and subtraction without accessing the machine’s carry bit. To illustrate with double-length addition, let the operands be (x₁, x₀) and (y₁, y₀), and the result be (z₁, z₀). Subscript 1 denotes the most significant half, and subscript 0 the least significant. We assume that all 32 bits of the registers are used. The less significant words are unsigned quantities.

This executes in nine instructions. The second line can be permitting a four-instruction solution on machines ...