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about .code16

Nick Clifton nickc@redhat.com
Sun Feb 11 13:40:00 GMT 2001 
Hi Yu,

: hi,could someone told me that,what's the exact difference between
: the instructions produced by gas with directive .code16 and without 
: it?

You really need to provide some more context before a complete answer
can be given.  For example, what target are you talking about and
which tool ?

If you are talking about the assembler (gas) and you are takling about
an ARM or a MIPS based target, then the .code16 directive tells the
assembler to switch into the smaller, 16 bit instruction set.  Both
the ARM and the MIPS architectures support an alternative, smaller
instruction set (16 bit vs 32 bit) which is intended to improve code
density.

Cheers
	Nick
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