:register dancing: n. Many older processor architectures suffer
from a serious shortage of general-purpose registers. This is
especially a problem for compiler-writers, because their generated
code needs places to store temporaries for things like intermediate
values in expression evaluation. Some designs with this problem,
like the Intel 80x86, do have a handful of special-purpose
registers that can be pressed into service, providing suitable care
is taken to avoid unpleasant side effects on the state of the
processor: while the special-purpose register is being used to hold
an intermediate value, a delicate minuet is required in which the
previous value of the register is saved and then restored just before
the official function (and value) of the special-purpose register is
again needed.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
accumulator n. obs.
1. Archaic term for a register. On-line
use of it as a synonym for `register' is a fairly reliable
indication that the user has been around for quite a while and/or
that the architecture under discussion is quite old....
orthogonal: [from mathematics] adj. Mutually independe well
separated; sometimes, irrelevant to. Used in a generalization of
its mathematical meaning to describe sets of primitives or
capabilities that, like a vector basis in geometry, span the
entire `capability space' of the system and are in some sense
non-overlapping or mutually independent....
