Final assignment

Our last programming assignment is based on the string-processing program given by Dandamudi in Chapter 10. Click here for another copy of the asssignment.

The class will not meet on Tuesday, April 29. Students are encouraged to attend the Alive Day showing in AA 158 (across from the computer lab) at 5:30 p.m. on that day. Marine Michael Jernigan, one of the wounded Iraq veterans featured in the HBO program, is a student on this campus, and he will be speaking at this event.

We will meet in the computer lab AA 156 at the scheduled time for our final exam, which is Tuesday, May 6, at 4:30 p.m. We will run some experiments to compare computer performance for high-level language versus assembly language. Be there!

arguments on the command line

Examples in Java, C shell, in C, and in C as shown in class.

Here is the site to which Mr. Kangas referred us.

Programming assignment

Three programs:

dotprod.asm, the dot product of two vectors in 3-space, so that
<a, b, c> • <x, y, z> = ax + by + cz

matmult2.asm, the product of two 2 x 2 matrices

matmult3.asm, the product of two 3 x 3 matrices

All inputs will be integers in the range [-9, 9].

Any intelligible interface routine is acceptable.

Instruction set reference

My concise spiral manual is from 1987. This Intel Pentium manual is from 1997 (tempus fugit!) — section 3.2 is the part that interests me. Although it gives microcode, it does not give clock cycles. And here's the overwhelming 2008 version. Still no clocks.

Who uses BCD nowadays?

I was wondering. A search on the IEEE web page yielded these abstracts one, two which indicate that BCD is still useful in commercial apps.

Most computer architecture / organization books give nuts-and-bolts information on how arithmetic is carried out, including BCD arithmetic when it's in special circuitry — complex, admirable.