CSCI 320 — Chapter 6 comments

The PowerPoint

• Architecture or Programming (Section 6.7)

Because MIPS programming was done in the last two offerings of CSCI 255 and we did the x86-64 before the break, we only have one thing to do here.

Notes on the PowerPoint

• Slide 122: Exceptions
  • Synchronous exceptions — You can identify the offending statement
  • Asynchronous exceptions — Java VirtualMachineError
• Slide 123: Exception Registers
  • MIPS Coprocessor 0 control registers
• Slide 124: Exception Causes
• Slide 125: Exception Flow

C / Unix signal handling

It ain’t pretty.

• Pretty complete example on GitHub
• Overview of signals
• signaction system call
• kill system call
• kill command

One of the first high-level programming language constructs for exception handling with the ON-condition of PL/I. Today exception handling is based on the catch and throw of LISP. One of the first programming languages to use this model with a syntax-based mechanism was CLU.

Many machine exceptions, such as page faults, are not user-level program exceptions.