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In a simple central processing unit (CPU), the PC is a digital counter (which is the origin of the term "program counter") that may be one of several hardware registers. The instruction cycle [ 7] begins with a fetch, in which the CPU places the value of the PC on the address bus to send it to the memory. The memory responds by sending the ...
The program counter is typically set to a hard coded value when the CPU is first powered on, and will hence execute whatever machine code happens to be at this address. Similarly, the program counter can be set to execute whatever machine code is at some arbitrary address, even if this is not valid machine code.
The instruction cycle (also known as the fetch–decode–execute cycle, or simply the fetch-execute cycle) is the cycle that the central processing unit (CPU) follows from boot-up until the computer has shut down in order to process instructions. It is composed of three main stages: the fetch stage, the decode stage, and the execute stage.
Low-level programming language. A low-level programming language is a programming language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture; commands or functions in the language are structurally similar to a processor's instructions. Generally, this refers to either machine code or assembly language.
Control flow. v. t. e. In computer science, control flow (or flow of control) is the order in which individual statements, instructions or function calls of an imperative program are executed or evaluated. The emphasis on explicit control flow distinguishes an imperative programming language from a declarative programming language.
A counter machine or counter automaton is an abstract machine used in a formal logic and theoretical computer science to model computation. It is the most primitive of the four types of register machines. A counter machine comprises a set of one or more unbounded registers, each of which can hold a single non-negative integer, and a list of ...
Source lines of code. Source lines of code ( SLOC ), also known as lines of code ( LOC ), is a software metric used to measure the size of a computer program by counting the number of lines in the text of the program's source code. SLOC is typically used to predict the amount of effort that will be required to develop a program, as well as to ...
A hot spot in computer science is most usually defined as a region of a computer program where a high proportion of executed instructions occur or where most time is spent during the program's execution (not necessarily the same thing since some instructions are faster than others). If a program is interrupted randomly, the program counter (the ...