Incomputer science, aNOP,no-op, orNOOP (pronounced "no op"; short forno operation) is amachine language instruction and itsassembly language mnemonic,programming language statement, orcomputer protocol command that does nothing.

Some computerinstruction sets include an instruction whose purpose is to not change the state of any of the programmer-accessibleregisters,status flags, ormemory. It often takes a well-defined number ofclock cycles to execute. In other instruction sets, there is no explicit NOP instruction, but the assembly language mnemonic NOP represents an instruction which acts as a NOP; e.g., on theSPARC,sethi 0, %g0.

A NOP must not access memory, as that could cause amemory fault orpage fault.

A NOP is most commonly used for timing purposes, to forcememory alignment, to preventhazards, to occupy abranch delay slot, to render void an existing instruction such as a jump, as a target of anexecute instruction, or as a place-holder to be replaced by active instructions later on in program development (or to replace removed instructions when reorganizing would be problematic or time-consuming). In some cases, a NOP can have minor side effects; for example, on theMotorola 68000 series of processors, the NOP opcode causes a synchronization of thepipeline.^[1]

Listed below are the NOP instruction for some CPU architectures:

From a hardware design point of view, unmapped areas of a bus are often designed to return zeroes; since theNOP slide behavior is often desirable, it gives a bias to coding it with the all-zeroes opcode.

A function or a sequence of programming language statements is a NOP or null statement if it has no effect. Null statements may be required by thesyntax of some languages in certain contexts.

InAda, thenull statement serves as a NOP.^[35] As the syntax forbids that control statements or functions be empty, thenull statement must be used to specify that no action is required. (Thus, if the programmer forgets to write a sequence of statements, the program will fail to compile.)

The simplest NOP statement in C is thenull statement, which is just a semi-colon in a context requiring a statement.

Most C compilers generate no code for null statements, which has historical and performance reasons.

  ;

An empty block (compound statement) is also a NOP, and may be more legible, but will still have no code generated for it by the compiler.

  {}

In some cases, such as the body of a function, a block must be used, but this can be empty. In C, statements cannot be empty—simple statements must end with a; (semicolon) while compound statements are enclosed in{} (braces), which does not itself need a following semicolon. Thus in contexts where a statement is grammatically required, some such null statement can be used.

The null statement is useless by itself, but it can have a syntactic use in a wider context, e.g., within the context of a loop:

while(getchar()!='\n'){}

alternatively,

while(getchar()!='\n');

or more tersely:

while(getchar()!='\n');

The last form might generate a warning with some compilers or compiler options, as a semicolon placed after a parenthesis at the end of a line usually indicates the end of a function call expression.

The above code continues calling the functiongetchar() until it returns a\n (newline) character, essentially fast-forwarding the current reading location of standard input to the beginning of next line.

InFortran, theCONTINUE statement is used in some contexts such as the last statement in a DO loop, although it can be used anywhere, and does not have any functionality.

TheJavaScript language does not have a built-in NOP statement. Many implementations are possible:

• Use the;empty statement^[36] or the{} emptyblock statement the same way as in theC and derivatives examples;
• Use theundefined or thenull expression as a complete statement (anexpression statement) when the previous methods are not allowed by the syntax.

Alternatives, in situations where a function is required, are:

• Use theFunction.prototype() built-in function, that accepts any arguments and returnsundefined;^[37]
• Use a NOP function available in a third-party library —see below;
• Define a custom NOP function, as in the following example (using theES6 arrow function syntax):

constnoop=()=>{};

TheAngularJS framework providesangular.noop function that performs no operations.

ThejQuery library provides a functionjQuery.noop(), which does nothing.^[38]

TheLodash library provides a function_.noop(), which returns undefined and does nothing.^[39]

As with C, the ; used by itself can be used as a null statement inPascal. In fact, due to the specification of the language, in a BEGIN / END block, the semicolon is optional before the END statement, thus a semicolon used there is superfluous.

Also, a block consisting of BEGIN END; may be used as a placeholder to indicate no action, even if placed inside another BEGIN / END block.

ThePython programming language has apass statement which has no effect when executed and thus serves as a NOP. It is primarily used to ensure correct syntax due to Python'sindentation-sensitive syntax; for example the syntax for definition of aclass requires an indented block with the class logic, which has to be expressed aspass when it should be empty.

The ':' [colon] command is a shell builtin that has similar effect to a "NOP" (a do-nothing operation). It is not technically an NOP, as it changes the special parameter $? (exit status of last command) to 0. It may be considered a synonym for the shell builtin 'true', and its exit status is true (0).^[40][41][42]

TheTeX typographical system's macro language has the\relax command.^[43] It does nothing by itself, but may be used to prevent the immediately preceding command from parsing any subsequent tokens.^[44]

Manycomputer protocols, such astelnet, include a NOP command that a client can issue to request a response from the server without requesting any other actions. Such a command can be used toensure the connection is still alive or that the server is responsive. A NOOP command is part of the following protocols (this is a partial list):

• telnet
• FTP
• SMTP
• X11
• POP3
• NNTP
• finger
• IMAP4
• BitTorrent

Unlike the other protocols listed, the IMAP4 NOOP command has a specific purpose—it allows the server to send any pending notifications to the client.

While mosttelnet orFTP servers respond to a NOOP command with "OK" or "+OK", some programmers have added quirky responses to the client. For example, theftpd daemon ofMINIX responds to NOOP with the message:^[45]

200 NOOP to you too!

NOPs are often involved whencracking software that checks for serial numbers, specific hardware or software requirements, presence or absence of hardwaredongles, etc. in the form of aNOP slide. This process is accomplished by alteringfunctions and subroutines to bypass security checks and instead simply return the expected value being checked for. Because most of the instructions in the security check routine will be unused, these would be replaced with NOPs, thus removing the software's security functionality without altering the positioning of everything which follows in the binary.

The NOP opcode can be used to form aNOP slide, which allows code to execute when the exact value of the instruction pointer is indeterminate (e.g., when a buffer overflow causes a function's return address on the stack to be overwritten).

• Comment (computer programming) – annotations generally for programmers that are ignored by compilers and interpreters
• Computer architecture
• Filler text
• Halt and Catch Fire – also pauses the CPU
• HLT (x86 instruction) – pauses the CPU
• Identity function – the functional programming equivalent to NOP
• IEFBR14 – mainframe tautology
• xyzzy (computing) – a command sometimes used instead of NOP
• X86 instruction listings#Added in P5/P6-class processors –NOPL, the official longNOP

• Machine code
• Computing acronyms
• X86 instructions

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata