Virtual CPU - Adders & Signing Discussed

Let us review the physical electronics our code emulated for addition, we created the function "AddTwoBytes" which in

turn used "Adder", the adder being the code:

Sum = Cin ^ (A ^ B);

Cout = (A & B) | (Cin & (A ^ B));

This is of course the code representation of electronic logic gates "AND" "OR" and "XOR", we could have gon further and rather than use "XOR" as a single operation we could have broken it down into separate "AND" and "OR" gates itself.  This is how the first computers worked after all.  A good electronics primer is a good place to start looking at logic gates in more detail.

But the use of "XOR" as a single unit, rather than a more complex set of other logic gates is what we programmers would call encapsulation.

We Encapsulated this whole logic into a call called "Adder" and we encapsulated its use to add each bit of two bytes into yet another function.

Luckily electronics engineers have been at this encapsulation lark as long as us programmers, and so instead of representing the adder logic like this:

They've gone a head and made the Adder look like this:

And then if we think about wiring each bit of two bytes through adders, each adder passing its carry out to the carry in of the next we get this wonderfully complex diagram:

Do not be scared by this, yes I drew it by hand so there maybe bugs, but all I want you to gleam from this is how complex the electronics are, because remember this mass of wires and adders and inside each adder the logic gates equates to the simple loop in the "AddTwoBytes" code!

This is one of the reasons many people emulate electronics or CPU's or just this kind of gated logic in software, because creating the hardware can be so much more complex, costly and hard to get right first time, but code we can change with a wave of the hand.

This representation, wiring each bit from the registers, is purposefully complex however, and there are other adders you can look at.

So how does all this get us signed numbers in our CPU?

When we enter signed mode in the CPU we want to consider the top most bit of our bytes as a sign, when this bit is off (0) then the number is a positive, when the bit is on (1) then the number is negative.

The flag doesn't really mean "and now this is negative", it is actually that we change the meaning of the value, so the top most bit changes from having a value of +128, to having a value of -128.

Hence the binary, 00000111 is still 7... but 1000111 is now ( -128 + 4 + 2 + 1 ) holding the value -121.

Back to our electronics then, if you have the top most bit set and you over flow, do we want to just throw it away as an error?... Well no, because it maybe that the number has just gone from being a negative to a positive, or its gone from a positive to a negative... So we want to carry the overflow back to the first adder...

But, of course this won't work, because you can't have an input to a process which is that very same process's output...

So what do those sneaky electronics chaps do?

Well... I'm not going to tell you... Go find out...