index register
- noun
- Specialized
:
registro de índice
- Using an index register simplifies memory addressing by allowing relative addressing of data during execution.
- base and index register
Examples
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For these surprise branch target instruction fetches, only the base or index register contents are used, depending on which register the branch instruction used.
Academic text (1999) -
If a base register was not used, only bits from the index register were used.
Academic text (1999) -
In the case of branches, the branch address is rarely based on both a base and an index register.
Academic text (1999) -
For the operand absolute address history array index, the G4 used only bits from the base or index register.
Academic text (1999) -
The original G4 design used bits from the base or index register values for operand requests and a value based on the current instruction stream for instruction requests.
Academic text (1999) -
The programmer set the index register to point to the beginning of the data array.
-
When executing the loop, the CPU incremented the index register to access each element sequentially.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The term is a straightforward noun–noun compound: a 'register' that serves as or holds an 'index' used to modify addresses. Given knowledge of both constituent senses (especially the computing sense of 'register'), the overall meaning is directly compositional and predictable to learners.
Etymology
Index register comes from the idea of a small storage, a register, that holds an index—like a finger pointing to a place in the computer's memory. That's why an index register is the tiny part of the processor that keeps that position so a program can quickly find or change a memory address.
