Branch Instructions
As I’ve presented it so far, the processor moves through each line in a program in sequence until it reaches the end of the program, at which point the program’s output is available to the user.
There are certain instructions in the instruction stream, however, that allow the processor to jump to a program line that is out of sequence. For instance, by inserting a branch instruction into line 5 of a program, we could cause the processor’s control unit to jump all the way down to line 20 and begin executing there (a forward branch), or we could cause it to jump back up to line 1 (a backward branch). Because a program is an ordered sequence of instructions, by including forward and backward branch instructions, we can arbitrarily ...
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