Re:RISC-V asm instruction name madness
by int_19h on Monday March 14, 2022 @10:04AM
(#30672580)
VM instruction sets are generally not written by people, but they're occasionally read by people (who might have to do so for debugging). And terse mnemonics are not good for readability.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
> And terse mnemonics are not good for readability.
I disagree there, though it would be nice to see some actual research on these issues. I for one see pointlessly long mnemonics as kind of a worst case for surveyability, maybe even worse than pretty-printed English-like phrases as seen in BASIC or COBOL.
(Of course, seemingly "long" mnemonics often result from orthogonality in the insn set, e.g. as in PCLMULHQLQDQ mentioned in a sibling comment. In that case, having a "long" mnemonic is indeed better than compacting it and losing track of its internal structure.)
I dunno; e.g. IL doesn't look pointlessly long to me, and it's certainly nowhere near COBOL level of verbosity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CIL_instructions
Mostly it uses well-established terse mnemonics - e.g. for branching or arithmetic - but stuff related to CLI object model and other unusual things are spelled out more fully.