[Dwarf-Discuss] DWARF on systems where memory is not byte addressable

[Michael Eager]

On 07/26/2012 12:29 PM, Robinson, Paul wrote:
>

> Michael Eager wrote:
>> Word-oriented platforms which have byte-addressable memory seems be a
>> self-contradiction.
>
> The PDP-10 (my first machine) was a 36-bit word-addressable machine.
> It had a "byte pointer" format that could specify an arbitrary byte within a
> word. So, there was a hardware-defined bit pattern to specify any given
> byte in memory, and instructions that could load and store just that byte.
> Nobody ever described the PDP-10 as byte-addressable, but you could
> make a pedantic argument for it.

So were several Burroughs machines.  None had byte addressable memory.
Each that I'm acquainted with (and many other architectures) have
instructions which will extract a sub-word value from an addressable unit.

DWARF describes data in terms of memory addressable units.  Let's not
let contrived arguments confuse the issue.

-- 
Michael Eager	 eager at eagercon.com
1960 Park Blvd., Palo Alto, CA 94306  650-325-8077