[TUHS] The birth of the Z3

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Mon May 14 07:30:42 AEST 2018


    > From: Clem Cole

    > Their is a open question about the need to support self modifying code
    > too. I personally don't think of that as important as the need for
    > conditional instructions which I do think need to be there before you
    > can really call it a computer. 

Here's one way to look at it: with conditional branching, one can always
write a program to _emulate_ a machine with self-modifying code (if that's
what floats your boat, computing-wise) - because that's exactly what older,
simple microcoded machines (which don't, of course, have self-modifying code
- their programs are in ROM) do.

	Noel



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