UMBC CS 201, Fall 08
UMBC CMSC 201
Fall '08

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CMSC 201
Programming Project Five

Instruction Set Simulator

Out: Monday 11/24/08
Due Date: Sunday 12/07/08, before midnight

The design document
for this project, design5.txt, is due:
Before Midnight, Sunday 11/30/08

The Objective

The purpose of this assignment is to give you practice using command line arguments, guarding header files, and working with linked-list implementations of both stacks and queues.

Background

When using C, we code in a high-level language. Many people think of C as a low-level language when considering the heirarchy of programming languages. However, it is a high-level language since it has to be compiled down to machine code. Before the machine code can be created, C source code gets compiled down to a language named Assembly and then into the machine code. Assembly is a language of simple instructions which uses registers to hold values, and executes commands based on the contents of those registers.

Wikipedia defines an instruction set simulator (ISS) to be a simulation model, usually coded in a high-level programming language, which mimics the behavior of a mainframe or microprocessor by "reading" instructions and maintaining internal variables which represent the processor's registers.

If you are interested in Assembly language coding, you'll have an opportunity to do that in CMSC 313. Some of our upper level classes and research labs give students a chance to work with operating systems, machine devices, and assembly code, in an attempt to solve issues with performance and usability of the systems we use today.

The Task

The Structures

You will need to implement two different data structures for this project (however you will only use one per execution) :

The Commands

The Operands

Execution

The Data File

Specifications