Re: Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC

On Fri, 7 Mar 2025 02:27:59 -0000 (UTC), Waldek Hebisch wrote:

VAX intstructions are very complex and much of that complexity is hard
to use in compilers.

A lot of them mapped directly to common high-level operations. E.g. MOVC3/
MOVC5 for string copying, and of course POLYx for direct evaluation of
polynomial functions.

In a way, one could say that, in many ways, VAX machine language was a
higher-level language than Fortran.