[34S] Time diff. STO.00 vs. STO 00 ?

[Paul Dale]

(03-12-2014 02:25 AM)Sikuq Wrote:  What surprised me was the persistence of the locals even after I exited the program but did not yet detach the pointer. I was wondering if the internal local assignment perhaps was stored in a faster but volatile memory bank (i.e. stack) than the global registers. Unfortunately I don't know if the 34s hardware has such internal sophistications. That's why I try to on-stack my interim data as I assume it is a lot faster to do stack rolls than say STO xx and then RCL xx.

Locals persist until the calling frame they were allocated in returns. At the very top level, a return is impossible but I think RTN still deallocates them as do a few other things (Marcus's area not mine).

Locals are kept in non-volatile memory between the registers and the program space. Each local register is the equivalent of four program steps. Plus some housekeeping overhead.

Quote:While here, did you touch upon the internal housekeeping of the 34s in respect to (de)fragmentation of files? Do the files individually have to be completely contiguous?

There is no fragmentation in the 34S. Everything is kept compacted at all times. Fortunately, the CPU is very good at moving memory around and there really isn't much memory to move.


- Pauli