Frequency Analysis of Machine Instructions in Computer Program systems

摘要

This paper reports partial results of an analysis to develop a tool for estimating the number of instructions in a program system. For the analysis, instructions were aggregated into classes, e.g., arithmetic, shift, decision. The analysis examined the relationships between the number of instructions in a class and the total number of instructions in a computer program sister. The work completed to date provides counts of the number of instructions and classes of instructions in nine program systems. Results indicate that a consistent relationship exists between the number of instructions in the decision class and the length of each program system.