Harvard vs. vonNeuman

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Mon Sep 27 23:01:20 2004

It was thus said that the Great ben franchuk once stated:
>
> I have yet to see a good use for self-modifying code. Other than
> subroutines and interupts placing data into a code segement the only
> self modifying code I have seen was for the 8088.

  Back when I took Assembly langauge (8086) at college, I used
self-modifying code in one of the assignments (the teacher and I didn't get
along and this was my attempt at getting a "rise" out of the teacher). The
assignment was to sort a list of numbers in ascending or descending order
(depending upon user input) so I simply changed the jump instruction after
the compare in the sort routine. It saved either two copies of the routine
(differing in only a single instruction), a complicated logical nest in the
middle of a sort routine, or using a callback routine.

  As far as I can recall, that was the *only* time I've ever done
self-modifying code.

  -spc (And it seemed like a good reason at the time ... )
Received on Mon Sep 27 2004 - 23:01:20 BST