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<p>Why, indeed. I think after you've programmed enough assembler,
you find things to like and detest about all of them. So I've
done BAL-360, PDP-10, PDP-11, PDP-8, Intel 80286 and up as well as
VAX and Alpha. There were others. Which one did I like most?
Why, the ones I got paid to work on, of course.</p>
<p>After that, what mattered was how friendly the development
environment was and in that regard, the 360 really drove me crazy;
very poor non-interactive debugging tools (at the time). The
PDP-10's debugger was wonderful as well as the instruction set and
a reasonable amount of registers. The PDP-8 mimicked that to a
certain extent, so the fact that there is only one accumulator
presented an interesting challenge. Ditto my experience with the
11. I honestly don't remember enough VAX assembler to comment
meaningfully on it.</p>
<p>Passing to the Intel chips, I would really say it mattered what
development tools you used. Microsoft's show the Macro-10
heritage and the Codeview debugger was completely reasonable.
There were a number of things that bothered me, but the register
file wasn't one of them; not after the PDP-8. The segmented
memory model never bothered me at all; not when it offered half a
gigabyte of virtual address space on the 286 (2**13 selectors *
64K). As a matter of fact, I thought it was <u>great</u> because
it gave more granularity than guard pages, which is all you can
use on the VAX, Alpha and PDP-10.</p>
<p>But really, only a real nerd (like me) would care about any of
this. Otherwise, you really can't tell; not in most high level
languages. And I think Linus probably said it best when he noted
that the Intel chips were so fast that register scheduling really
didn't matter. It's true, particularly because behind the curtain
it's doing register score-boarding.<br>
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<p>You might want to check out AMD's 64 bit extensions to the
80x86 ISA; I've taught that assembler and it's quite reasonable,
particularly if you are not using the arcane AT&T syntax: 16
registers and more flexibility in using them; very close to the
VAX and PDP-10. I miss PushA, though. Or maybe I like x86-64
because I got paid to use it.</p>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Really, Paul; this is a matter of
personal taste more than anything else--I don't think it's
possible to decide anything more than what you like...<br>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">On 4/22/20 9:44 AM, Paul Koning wrote:
I can see an Alpha, but why would you want a wacko architecture created by Intel? It's not as if they have any track record of designing nice CPU architectures.
paul
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">On Apr 22, 2020, at 9:30 AM, Keith Halewood <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:Keith.Halewood@pitbulluk.org"><Keith.Halewood@pitbulluk.org></a> wrote:
I might actually go out and buy a cheap alpha or itanic at some point now….. if such things exist.
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