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From: Dan Purgert <dan@djph.net>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Emigration from Usenet [was: Re: PTD was the most-respected of
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Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2024 09:33:10 -0000 (UTC)
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On 2024-08-07, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On 07 Aug 2024 15:04:21 GMT, Aharon Robbins wrote:
>
>> A CS professor I know told me this last week:
>> 
>>       I'm one of the very few that teach Systems. It amazes me that our 
>>       PhD students almost all in AI have never heard of a program
>>       counter.
>
> “Program counter” ... is that a von Neumann thing?

It's the thing that holds the address of the current instruction being
executed.

Effectively, CPU's operate like this loop here

  int pc=0;
  while (1) {
    execute_instruction (pc);
    pc++;
  }

After that, 'execute_instruction' can be thought of as a big conditional
statement that actually performs the task -- moving data between CPU
registers, reading from RAM, whatever.

-- 
|_|O|_| 
|_|_|O| Github: https://github.com/dpurgert
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