Le 13/08/2024 à 08:37, Erik Christiansen via Dng a écrit :
> And I still value understanding that gobbeldygook like "dereferencing"
> merely refers to "indirect addressing", something that pretty much every
> processor has in its instruction set. Not all syntactic sugar is
> beneficial, I think.

    Exactly: dereferencing is "register addressing with offset", ie,
adding an offset to the value of a register to get the address, in one
single instruction. AFAIR the IBM assembler provided usefull "syntactic
sugar" to this instruction. But strictly speaking, what is an assembler
if not syntactic sugar?

    In pretty all architectures this addressing mode is possible for
data. There was a great innovation in the Motorolla M6809, around 1980:
it was also possible for branching, which made PIC and PIE
straightforward. Still today, AFAIK, this isn't common and I wonder why.

    BTW, I don't understand "gobbeldygook". Sorry, not a native English
speaker.

--     Didier