Today's microprocessors are the powerful descendants of the von Neumann 1 computer dating back to a memo of Burks, Goldstine, and von Neumann of 1946. The so-called von Neumann architecture is characterized by a se quential control flow resulting in a sequential instruction stream. A program counter addresses the next instruction if the preceding instruction is not a control instruction such as, e. g., jump, branch, subprogram call or return. An instruction is coded in an instruction format of fixed or variable length, where the opcode is followed by one or more operands that can be data,...