Turing instruction set

Turing has been designed to be a reasonably complex CPU with instructions that reflect most of the operations that real CPUs can carry out:

• Simple arithmetic (but limited to add and subtract)
• Logical operations (and,or and bit shifts)
• Register loading to and from each other and memory
• Input and Output instructions
• Instructions that change the flow of the program (decisions)
• Stack operations (push and pop)

The processor is capable of a range of different addressing modes to allow this feature of CPUs to be explored.

Memory locations can contain data of three different types:

• program instructions/data
• numbers (assumed to be integers)
• character data

This narrow range of numeric represention still allows users to explore wider algorithms including floating point and other numeric representations by software emulation (ie writing algorithms).