Branch (computer science)

For other uses, see Branch (disambiguation). A Branch is a part of a woody plant Branch or branching may also refer to Computing Branch (computer science

A branch (or jump on some computer architectures, such as the PDP-8 and Intel x86) is a point in a computer program where the flow of control is altered. In Computer engineering, computer architecture is the conceptual design and fundamental operational structure of a Computer system The PDP-8 was the first successful commercial Minicomputer, produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC in the 1960s See also X86 assembly language The generic term x86 refers to the most commercially successful Instruction set architecture in the history of Personal Computer programs (also software programs, or just programs) are instructions for a Computer. In Computer science control flow (or alternatively flow of control refers to the order in which the individual statements, instructions or Function The term branch is usually used when referring to a program written in machine code or assembly language; in a high-level programming language, branches usually take the form of conditional statements, subroutine calls or GOTO statements. Machine code or machine language is a system of instructions and data executed directly by a Computer 's Central processing unit. See the terminology section below for information regarding inconsistent use of the terms assembly and assembler In computing a high-level programming language is a Programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer In Computer science, conditional statements, conditional expressions and conditional constructs are features of a Programming language which In Computer science, a subroutine ( function, method, procedure, or subprogram) is a portion of code within a larger GOTO is a statement found in many computer Programming languages It is a combination of the English words go and to An instruction that causes a branch, a branch instruction, can be taken or not taken: if a branch is not taken, the flow of control is unchanged and the next instruction to be executed is the instruction immediately following the current instruction in memory; if taken, the next instruction to be executed is an instruction at some other place in memory. Computer data storage, often called storage or memory, refers to Computer components devices and recording media that retain digital There are two usual forms of branch instruction: a conditional branch that can be either taken or not taken, depending on a condition such as a CPU flag, and an unconditional branch which is always taken. In Computer programming, flag refers to one or more Bits that are used to store a binary value or Code that has an assigned meaning

Examples

An unconditional branch in Intel assembly language:

jmp 0x00100000

A conditional branch in Intel assembly language:

jz 0x00100000

In Computer science control flow (or alternatively flow of control refers to the order in which the individual statements, instructions or Function In Computer architecture, a delay slot is an instruction slot that gets executed without the effects of a preceding instruction In Computer architecture, a branch predictor is the part of a processor that determines whether a Conditional branch in the instruction In Computer programming, a branch table (sometimes known as a jump table) is a term used to describe an efficient method of transferring program control ( branching An indirect branch (also known as a computed jump, indirect jump and register-indirect jump is a type of program control instruction present Pipelining redirects here For HTTP pipelining see HTTP pipelining. Spaghetti code is a Pejorative term for Source code which has a complex and tangled Control structure, especially one using many GOTOs exceptions

© 2009 citizendia.org; parts available under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License, from http://en.wikipedia.org
network: | |