[joezydeco]

That's a beautiful explanation. It's one of my favorite things about the ARM instruction set.

That said, it also means debugging becomes a bit more painful. Let's say you want your (cheap) JTAG debugger to halt on the count++ instruction. You can hard break on that particular address in code, but you will always hit that address whether the condition was met or not.

[samatman]

Knowing nothing about the tools, why can't you set a breakpoint based on a bitmask of the instruction pointer?

I'm new to the assembly world, I've been working my way down and have gotten as far as Forth.

[joezydeco]

Better tools can, thus the (cheap) qualifier on my comment.