Chromatix wrote:
Well, there's a lot to not like about x86, especially if you're used to the VAX - or, for that matter, pretty much *any* sane ISA.
A dislike of ARM and MIPS, however, can only be put down to a bias against RISC. "What, you have to issue separate instructions to load a pre-and-post-indexed-double-indirect memory operand before you can calculate the cube root of it? I should be able to do that all in one instruction!"
IMHO the sanity of ISA is rather a matter of taste. I have some VAX programming experience. IMHO it was like a ride on a dinosaur. The x86 ISA, on the contrary, has always been one of the best for its time. IMHO only the ARM-32 ISA could compete with it. It can not fail to impress much that the 8086 designed in a way that considers importance of atomic operations or simultaneous instruction execution. The latter was missed by the 68k and VAX ISA which set flags after almost every executed instruction. I was also impressed that the theoretically slower 8086 or even 8088 can outperform the large 68000 when they execute byte manipulation code.
