Re: MINIMUM instruction set

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Article #8011

#8011

From: Scott Dorsey
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 00:10

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Val Kartchner writes:
> I've heard that it is possible to implement all programming languages with
> seven instructions.  (Possible does not mean practicle.)  Does anyone know
> what these instructions are?  Is it possible to do all operations in less
> than seven instructions?

Well, it's certainly practical.  The PDP-8, for example, had a total of
seven instructions, and while it wasn't any speed demon and wasn't the
best machine to program that I can think of, it worked and plenty of them
were sold.

It's possible to build a machine with a single instruction (subtract and
skip if equal), but definitely not practical.  I believe a student at U.
Waterloo actually constructed one as a class project; it was not very
useful though it was Turing-machine equivalent.
--scott

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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!news.larc.nasa.gov!grissom.larc.nasa.gov!kludge
From: kludge@grissom.larc.nasa.gov (Scott Dorsey)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: MINIMUM instruction set
Date: 13 Nov 1992 00:10:57 GMT
Organization: NASA Langley Research Center and Reptile Farm
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