Addressing Mode - Caveats

Caveats

Note that there is no generally accepted way of naming the various addressing modes. In particular, different authors and computer manufacturers may give different names to the same addressing mode, or the same names to different addressing modes. Furthermore, an addressing mode which, in one given architecture, is treated as a single addressing mode may represent functionality that, in another architecture, is covered by two or more addressing modes. For example, some complex instruction set computer (CISC) computer architectures, such as the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX, treat registers and literal/immediate constants as just another addressing mode. Others, such as the IBM System/390 and most reduced instruction set computer (RISC) designs, encode this information within the instruction. Thus, the latter machines have three distinct instruction codes for copying one register to another, copying a literal constant into a register, and copying the contents of a memory location into a register, while the VAX has only a single "MOV" instruction.

The term "addressing mode" is itself subject to different interpretations: either "memory address calculation mode" or "operand accessing mode". Under the first interpretation instructions that do not read from memory or write to memory (such as "add literal to register") are considered not to have an "addressing mode". The second interpretation allows for machines such as VAX which use operand mode bits to allow for a literal operand. Only the first interpretation applies to instructions such as "load effective address".

The addressing modes listed below are divided into code addressing and data addressing. Most computer architectures maintain this distinction, but there are, or have been, some architectures which allow (almost) all addressing modes to be used in any context.

The instructions shown below are purely representative in order to illustrate the addressing modes, and do not necessarily reflect the mnemonics used by any particular computer.