Implications of Structured Programming for Machine Architecture

Based on an empirical study of more than 10,000
lines of program text written in a GOTO-less 
language, a machine architecture specifically designed for
structured programs is proposed.  Since assignment, 
CALL, RETURN, and IF statements together account for
93 percent of all executable statements, special 
care is given to ensure that these statements can be implemented
efficiently.  A highly compact instruction 
encoding scheme is presented, which can reduce program
size by a factor of 3.  Unlike a Huffman code, 
which utilizes variable length fields, this method uses
only fixed length (1-byte) op code and address 
fields.  The most frequent instructions consist of a
single 1-byte field.  As a consequence, instruction 
decoding time is minimized, and the machine is
efficient with respect to both space and time.

CACM March, 1978

Tanenbaum, A.

machine architecture, computer architecture, computer
organization, instruction set design, program 
characteristics

4.12 4.22 4.9 6.21

CA780308 JB March 28, 1978  12:55 PM

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