The TC1 simulator program

In this section, we provide the full code for the TC1 assembler and simulator. This will enable you to construct and modify a computer assembler and simulator that can execute the code supported by TC1 or your own instruction set (if you modify TC1).

The assembler is the more complicated part because it involves reading text, analyzing it, and formatting it into binary codes. The simulator itself simply reads each binary code and then performs the appropriate action.

The simulator includes features that we haven’t covered yet in previous sections (e.g., debugging and trace facilities). In the first draft of this book, TC1 was rather more basic with a minimal subset of features. As the book was edited and the program modified, the set of features was enhanced to make it a more practical tool. We first provide brief notes on some of these features to aid understanding of the program.

Single-stepping

A computer executes instructions sequentially...