20 Jan
2024
20 Jan
'24
11:08 a.m.
On Jan 19, 2024, at 10:34 PM, Rodney Brown
<rdbrown0au(a)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