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[edit] Cleanup

I've added the cleanup tag, mostly because of the last half of the article. It says that branch instructions can be taken or not taken --- this is only true of conditional branches, not branches in general. This is then mentioned again in the last sentence of the paragraph. --Ferris37 17:05, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

In general, it is completely true that a branch can be taken or not taken. Every branch is either taken or not taken. It is just that unconditional branches are always taken and conditional branches involve a choice. I think the article is pretty good on this point: it defines the terms taken and not taken, then tells us that unconditionals are always taken, conditionals depend on a condition. Is this not clear? NicM 17:34, 3 October 2006 (UTC).

[edit] Merge proposal

There are three articles which roughly deal with the same (or largely overlapping) subjects: Branch (computer science), Conditional branch, and Jump instruction. I think it makes sense to consolidate them. I'm not particularly happy with the name of this article being qualified with "(computer science)" since there are other computing uses, as with Branching (software). Perhaps "Branch instruction" may be better? But first lets merge and then deal with the names. -- Dmeranda 07:39, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

• Support merge -- As long as the correct redirects are established, I'd support this merger. Atlant 16:31, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
• Support merge -- Definitely; there is no point in having three separate articles for what is already a vague term that may cover all the articles together. Addps4cat 19:03, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] History...

A long time ago, I worked on an HC11 and I seem to remember the learned professor making a distinction between jump and branch (probably only for that architecture). Anyone else remember more?--66.93.220.66 04:28, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

I was thinking of the same thing ... Why look at unconditional jumps as branching ? In my opinion the program executes linearly (almost), there are not two possibilities - branches, especially on the today's pipelined hardware. Bytencoder 12:20, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

In some processors, there is a branch-always instruction. In other processors, jump is a "branch always" but the distinction is made in the mneumonics. In still other processors, branch instructions have a limited range while jump instructions have a much larger range and/or different addressing modes for the destination. — Val42 19:31, 8 October 2007 (UTC)