IIRC it also introduced index based addressing. Before that, people just wrote s... | Hacker News

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		solarexplorer on Sept 23, 2024 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Alan Turing’s 1950 manual for the Mark I electroni... IIRC it also introduced index based addressing. Before that, people just wrote self modifying code to index arrays...

adrian_b on Sept 23, 2024 [–]

True.

The 8 index registers ("B-tube") are called B0 to B7 in this manual.

The B0 index register is hardwired to have the read-only value "0".

A read-only null register continues to be used in many modern instruction sets, e.g. in POWER or in Aarch64.

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