Everyone is always perfectly and completely aware of the jmp instructions that implement their if and while statements. Talking about them does not make you cleverer than anyone else.
What you are missing, and is the fundamental essence of the whole discussion, is that these jmp instructions don't just jump to any old place, like a goto. They jump to only very specific places corresponding to the boundaries of our if and while statements. The compiler will never generate an undisciplined branch, absent an actual goto in the source.
Beneath the jmp instructions there are register transfer machines, and beneath them are logic gates, and beneath them are transistors and wires, and beneath them are charge carriers and fields, and beneath those are atoms and crystalline structure.
At each level you can find the correspondence with structures in the next level above and below. In no case does the lower level violate the structural rules of the next level up, despite that in principle, it could. That is how we get systems that can be understood, and work.
> Talking about them does not make you cleverer than anyone else.
Please don't assume that any notion of my own cleverness is the crux of what I am saying or has anything to do with it.
> At each level you can find the correspondence with structures in the next level above and below. In no case does the lower level violate the structural rules of the next level up, despite that in principle, it could
Disagree, especially since you went so far as to talk about the physics. There is a lot of order created from chaos, and the structural rules are largely fiction, taking some effort to impose them.
But they are, in fact, imposed, or you would not be able to read this; thus, fictional only in that they were invented.
But in any case, and to the point, there is nothing fundamental about jmp instructions. They, and the sequential execution they interrupt, are a way to help organize state machines. It is a triumph of decades of effort that we have succeeded in making state machines of such complexity behave in comprehensible ways, and a deep failure that we have not found any better way.
What you are missing, and is the fundamental essence of the whole discussion, is that these jmp instructions don't just jump to any old place, like a goto. They jump to only very specific places corresponding to the boundaries of our if and while statements. The compiler will never generate an undisciplined branch, absent an actual goto in the source.
Beneath the jmp instructions there are register transfer machines, and beneath them are logic gates, and beneath them are transistors and wires, and beneath them are charge carriers and fields, and beneath those are atoms and crystalline structure.
At each level you can find the correspondence with structures in the next level above and below. In no case does the lower level violate the structural rules of the next level up, despite that in principle, it could. That is how we get systems that can be understood, and work.