list/dictionary as case statement ?

[Tom Plunket]

Hendrik van Rooyen wrote:

> It works well - and it is surprisingly fast too...
> And its easy if the opcodes are all say one byte,
> else you need an opcode length field too, and fancier
> parsing.

Often (always?) RISC architectures' instruction+operand lengths are
fixed to the word size of the machine.  E.g. the MIPS 3000 and 4000 were
32 bits for every instruction, and PC was always a multiple of four.
...which means the parsing is pretty straight forward, but as you say,
simulating the rest of the machine is the hard part.


-tom!

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