3 ms·

That digit order is an interesting choice to bring out more structure. The downside is the registers and RST instructions get weirdly permuted. (By the way, you

by kens 3y ago

That digit order is an interesting choice to bring out more structure. The downside is the registers and RST instructions get weirdly permuted. (By the way, your link is broken because the closing parenthesis gets appended; I recommend a space before it.) My suspicion is that Intel's manuals used hex because octal was kind of obsolete by that point.

kragen 3y ago
thanks for the note; i've made the suggested correction i agree about the registers and rst instructions i don't see how octal could be obsolete; computers still use binary, and octal is just as useful for doing binary arithmetic as it ever was. as you point out, it's considerably more useful for instruction sets with 3-bit fields. moreover, the great advantage of hexadecimal was that bcd was easy to read, but that stopped mattering around the time the 8008 was introduced i'm interested to hear if your experience differs, but i think it's a lot easier to do mental arithmetic in octal than in hex; it's a lot easier to remember 5 + 6 = 13, or figure it out if you forget, than d + c = 19, and both the addition and multiplication tables are one fourth the size as far as i can tell, octal just went out of style. if anything, hexadecimal became obsolete, because its killer advantage went away, while its drawbacks remained arm leaned into the hexadecimal wave and designed their instruction set to be easily readable in hex. we probably don't have to worry that a possible wide adoption of risc-v will initiate a transition to base 32, though; its instruction formats, while much simpler than thumb, resists any such easy numerical readability btw, i don't remember if i ever told you this, but thank you for xfractint
- kens 3y ago
  Octal is nice with a 12-bit machine but octal is absolutely awful when using bytes on a 16-bit machine. The problem is that the two bytes are encoded differently in octal. For example, the string "AB" is 4142 in hex while "BA" is 4241; the two bytes are easy to decode. In octal, "AB" is 40502 while "BA" is 41101; you can't see what's going on.
  - kragen 3y ago
    yes, that's true; multiplying a byte by 400 to form a word is kind of a pain i had a heathkit h8 which had an unusual approach to this problem it displayed memory addresses on its front panel in octal, from 000000 up to 377377
- xjay 3y ago
  In the context of a CPU's memory model, I wouldn't call it style because a byte--as an abstract term for the smallest addressable unit--is subdivided into nibbles (digits), where the size of a nibble dictates what base makes sense. A 9-bit byte is subdivided into three 3-bit nibbles/digits (2^3=base-8) [000, 777]. An 8-bit byte (octet) is evenly subdivided into two 4-bit nibbles/digits (2^4=base-16) [00, FF]. In documentation--given that the majority of computers use 8-bit bytes--the base we choose to represent 3-bit fields is a separate topic, and could be called style.
  - kragen 3y ago
    there's something to that as a side note, i have a quibble with your definition of 'byte'. lots of computers have been word-oriented, with words being generally the smallest addressable unit word sizes in word-addressed computers have included 12 bits (pdp-8), 16 bits (nova and tandem), 18 bits (pdp-7 and ga144), 20 bits (mup21), 32 bits (zuse z4, chifir, and maybe some ti dsps, not sure), 36 bits (pdp-10, ibm 704, ibm 709), 60 bits (cdc 6600), 64 bits (cray unless you count the parity bits), and so on it was not normal practice to describe any of these words as a 'byte'; more commonly, you would divide the word into (possibly variable-size) 'bytes', each representing one character, even though you couldn't load those bytes individually from memory

by kens 3y ago

kragen 3y ago

thanks for the note; i've made the suggested correction i agree about the registers and rst instructions i don't see how octal could be obsolete; computers still use binary, and octal is just as useful for doing binary arithmetic as it ever was. as you point out, it's considerably more useful for instruction sets with 3-bit fields. moreover, the great advantage of hexadecimal was that bcd was easy to read, but that stopped mattering around the time the 8008 was introduced i'm interested to hear if your experience differs, but i think it's a lot easier to do mental arithmetic in octal than in hex; it's a lot easier to remember 5 + 6 = 13, or figure it out if you forget, than d + c = 19, and both the addition and multiplication tables are one fourth the size as far as i can tell, octal just went out of style. if anything, hexadecimal became obsolete, because its killer advantage went away, while its drawbacks remained arm leaned into the hexadecimal wave and designed their instruction set to be easily readable in hex. we probably don't have to worry that a possible wide adoption of risc-v will initiate a transition to base 32, though; its instruction formats, while much simpler than thumb, resists any such easy numerical readability btw, i don't remember if i ever told you this, but thank you for xfractint

kens 3y ago
Octal is nice with a 12-bit machine but octal is absolutely awful when using bytes on a 16-bit machine. The problem is that the two bytes are encoded differently in octal. For example, the string "AB" is 4142 in hex while "BA" is 4241; the two bytes are easy to decode. In octal, "AB" is 40502 while "BA" is 41101; you can't see what's going on.
- kragen 3y ago
  yes, that's true; multiplying a byte by 400 to form a word is kind of a pain i had a heathkit h8 which had an unusual approach to this problem it displayed memory addresses on its front panel in octal, from 000000 up to 377377
xjay 3y ago
In the context of a CPU's memory model, I wouldn't call it style because a byte--as an abstract term for the smallest addressable unit--is subdivided into nibbles (digits), where the size of a nibble dictates what base makes sense. A 9-bit byte is subdivided into three 3-bit nibbles/digits (2^3=base-8) [000, 777]. An 8-bit byte (octet) is evenly subdivided into two 4-bit nibbles/digits (2^4=base-16) [00, FF]. In documentation--given that the majority of computers use 8-bit bytes--the base we choose to represent 3-bit fields is a separate topic, and could be called style.
- kragen 3y ago
  there's something to that as a side note, i have a quibble with your definition of 'byte'. lots of computers have been word-oriented, with words being generally the smallest addressable unit word sizes in word-addressed computers have included 12 bits (pdp-8), 16 bits (nova and tandem), 18 bits (pdp-7 and ga144), 20 bits (mup21), 32 bits (zuse z4, chifir, and maybe some ti dsps, not sure), 36 bits (pdp-10, ibm 704, ibm 709), 60 bits (cdc 6600), 64 bits (cray unless you count the parity bits), and so on it was not normal practice to describe any of these words as a 'byte'; more commonly, you would divide the word into (possibly variable-size) 'bytes', each representing one character, even though you couldn't load those bytes individually from memory