Re: Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC

On Tue, 11 Mar 2025 22:41:48 +0100, Terje Mathisen wrote:

I.e having the target on the left is the only one that makes sense to
me.

One of the early programming languages I came across was POP-2. This was
fully dynamic and heap-based, like Lisp, but also had an operand stack. So
a simple assignment statement looked like

    a -> b;

but this could actually be written as two separate statements:

    a;
    -> b;

The first one pushed the value of a on the stack, the second one popped it
off and stored it in b.

This made it easy to do things like swap variable values:

    a, b -> a -> b;