Megalextoria
Retro computing and gaming, sci-fi books, tv and movies and other geeky stuff.

Home » Digital Archaeology » Computer Arcana » Commodore » Commodore Emulation » Classifying Loops
Show: Today's Messages :: Show Polls :: Message Navigator
E-mail to friend 
Switch to threaded view of this topic Create a new topic Submit Reply
Classifying Loops [message #139455] Sun, 26 June 2005 18:39
Christian Lott is currently offline  Christian Lott
Messages: 492
Registered: January 2012
Karma: 0
Senior Member
I'm using the classification of loops given here (to start):
http://sofia.fhda.edu/gallery/java/unit06/lesson06-1.html

Loop Classification:

Type
=Iteration
=Selection
----------
=Iteration
-counted
-indefinite
--data
--sentinel
--limit

3Faces (bounds and goal)
*actions that occur before the loop is encountered.
*actions that occur inside the loop body.
*actions that occur after the loop is complete.

-bounds
-precondition
-advance
-goal

=Selection

--------------------------------

The goal is to classify 6502 assembly loops. Right now 64Copy classifies
loops as: goto, loop, and skip based on jump, branch back and branch
forward respectively.

Branching primitives are:

Branch forward
Branch back

Jump
Jump to subroutine
Jump indirect

--------------------------------

There are three different steps to classifying loops.

Where, when and why.

Where in the code.
When - on what conditions.
Why - based on context.

We can't get to the 'why' unless our code has been properly labeled.

Besides general classification we can analyze statistics:

# branches
frequency
recorder (compressing data sets)

The number of branches can be tallied along with their (iteration)
frequency and graphed accordingly. This will show us the hierarchy.

Individual ram bytes and registers can be monitored and recorded for
bounds checking if needed and that data compressed fairly easily in most
cases. Yet in most cases, the bounds of each loop will be more easily
determined from the code itself than monitoring individual bytes in a
running program.



Christian Lott
  Switch to threaded view of this topic Create a new topic Submit Reply
Previous Topic: VICE Event History and random
Next Topic: Henry's house problem
Goto Forum:
  

-=] Back to Top [=-
[ Syndicate this forum (XML) ] [ RSS ] [ PDF ]

Current Time: Fri Mar 29 06:19:35 EDT 2024

Total time taken to generate the page: 0.03295 seconds