4 Feb
2021
4 Feb
'21
10:55 p.m.
On Wed, 3 Feb 2021, Larry McVoy wrote:
The 68K was fairly clean; the VAX not so much... I got the impression
that it was designed by a committee i.e. everybody wanted to have their
own instruction/feature, and it showed. I do admit though that paging the
page tables was a stroke of genius.
The 68K always
reminded me of the VAX.
I'm not sure if that is a compliment or not. The NS320XX always reminded me more of the PDP-11
(which is by *far*
my favorite assembler, so uniform, I had a TA that could read the octal
dump of a PDP-11 like it was C). I wasn't that good but I could sort of
see what he was seeing and I never saw that in the VAX. 68K was closer
but I felt like the NS320xx was closer yet. Pity they couldn't produce
bug free chips.
I used to be a whiz on the 360 :-) As part of our final CompSci exams
we had to hand-assemble and disassemble some code, and I hardly ever referred
to the "green card".
Someone mentioned Z80000, I stopped at Z80 so I
don't know if that was
also a pleasant ISA.
The Z80 was quite nice; I wrote heaps of programs for it, and I even found
an ANSI C Compiler for it (Hi-Tech as I recall; BDS-C was, well, you could
barely call it "C")[*]. I compiled a number of Unix programs...
The x86 stuff is about as far away from PDP-11 as you
can get. Required
to know it, but so unpleasant.
The x86 architecture is utterly brain-dead; I mean, what's wrong with a
linear address space? I think it was JohnG who said "segment registers
are for worms".
I have to admit that I haven't looked at ARM
assembler, the M1 is making
me rethink that. Anyone have an opinion on where ARM lies in the pleasant
to unpleasant scale?
I've been looking at the ARM; it seems quite nice at first glance.
--lm who misses comp.arch back when CPU people hung
out there
Indeed. I gave up on USENET when the joint got flooded by spammers; I
still have my "cancel" script somewhere.
[*]
I think it was Henry Spencer who said (in an unrelated matter): "Somehow
to be called a C compiler, I think it ought at least be able to compile
C".
-- Dave, who ran aus.radio.amateur.*