Re: is Vax addressing sane today

On Sun, 8 Sep 2024 17:56:55 +0000, MitchAlsup1 wrote:

The problem with VAX was NOT that one could not put a lot of work in a
single instruction;
 
no,
 
The problem with VAX is that it made putting too much work in a single
instruction easy.

Perhaps there is also the issue of the wildly-variable instruction length.
A single VAX operand descriptor could be up to 6 bytes; I think the
instruction with the most general-format operands could have 6 of them:
so, plus opcode, such an instruction could be 37 bytes long.

While the shortest instruction could be just 1 byte.

Even those who are talking about “post-RISC” are, I think, still in favour
of RISC-style fixed instruction lengths.