> On Jan 19, 2024, at 10:34 PM, Rodney Brown <rdbrown...@gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
>
> I'm not a polymath who keeps lots of Assembly mnemonics in my head, so I
> hoped the "IEEE Standard for Microprocessor Assembly Language" IEEE Std
> 694-1985 1985 doi:10.1109/IEEESTD.1985.81632 would have taken off. I think
> only the Motorola 88000 used it and C probably was far more prevalent. I
> think the HPPA 1.1 then started the trend of SIMD instructions, so the
> portability would have reduced.
I had never heard of that IEEE standard, and it doesn't seem to have gone
anywhere. Which makes sense; assemblers represent the architectural choices of
the hardware, so standardizing them is a strange notion. You could standardize
a style of construction (making it sort of a "meta-standard") but that isn't
very interesting. The general style of opcode and operands had been the
predominant style by then, and for a long time before. Other styles, like CDC
6000 Compass (CPU side) or stranger examples seen on Electrologica, haven't
been used in ages.
About the only style issue that would be nice to have consistent is ordering:
does destination come first, as with ARM and IBM 360, or source first as with
PDP-11 and VAX? Then again, I suppose that's just about as hard a problem as
byte order.
paul
