Re: Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC

Stephen Fuld <sfuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid> writes:

I wonder if the different preferences is at least partially due to
whether the person has a hardware or a software background?  The idea is
that when hardware guys see the instruction, they think in terms of
register ports (read versus write), what is required of the memory
system (somewhat different for loads versus stores), etc.  However
software guys think of a language construct, e.g. X = Y, which is
logically a move.  I don't know if this is right, but I think it is
interesting.

 I am a software person.  When talking about register-memory copies, I
prefer to talk about load and store operations, whether I talk about
assembly language (even one where the mnemonic for these operations is
MOV) or C; in Forth the spoken names for these operations are "fetch"
(written: @) and "store" (written: !).