Patent ID: 7039789

Claim:
A method for circular addressing in a processor system providing increased compatibility with one or more higher-level programming languages, the method comprising responding to a single assembly language memory access instruction in a circular addressing mode specifying a base pointer, a base-pointer offset and a maximum offset value by the steps of: accessing a said base pointer; accessing a said base-pointer offset; adding the base-pointer offset to the base pointer to calculate an address of a current memory access in the circular addressing mode; accessing a current element in memory at the calculated address; after accessing the current element, incrementing the base-pointer offset by one; accessing a said maximum offset value; comparing the incremented base-pointer offset with the maximum offset value; if the incremented base-point offset is less than the maximum offset value, storing the incremented base-pointer offset; and if the incremented base-pointer offset is equal to the maximum offset value, setting the base-pointer offset to zero and storing the set base-pointer offset.