June 2025
Intermediate to advanced
152 pages
3h 15m
English
Content preview from simplicity
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| Practice 21 | Simplify Your Tests Using Tables |
A few years back I wrote an assembler and emulator for the PDP-11, the most popular minicomputer of the 1970s. It was one of those systems where you just had to get it right. A subtle bug in instruction decoding and execution might not reveal itself until some code that the emulator was executing just happened to trigger it.
One set of tests made sure that the emulator could correctly identify which machine instruction it was about to execute. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds—the PDP-11 instruction format was designed to fit as much information as possible into every 16-bit word. Sometimes one word would represent an opcode, two addressing modes, and two registers. Other times it might hold a branch ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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