[Oberon] FPGA Oberon some news and a reply to F.P.

[Jan Verhoeven]

No no, the 6502 was a second generation CISC CPU. The first RISC was 
probably the MIPS and perhaps the first ARM cpu used in the Archimedes. 
The MicroChip PIC was the first RISC processor to enter the market on a 
large scale in the early 90's. And of course the Atmel AVR. And more later.

What I am disappointed about is the fact that Wirth fell back to 
undecipherable mnemonics for his newly defined CPU.

The 6502 and 6800 were known for their BRA's. Intel 8080 was not much 
better with their DAD and LXI. The guys at Zilog used more letters and 
better acronyms: LD and RET. Zilog source code is one of the easiest to 
read back. Even after 30 years.

The 8086 is good readable too, as long as you reverse the operands... 
Intel moves backwards.
PIC uses CLR, SUBWF, INCF etc which has a very steep learning curve. The 
AVR is a bit like the 6xxx series but not too hard to learn.

And then came RISC5 which gave us mnemonics that look like the 
predecessor of the 6800...

And, worst of all, WHY would you want to fall back to mnemonics? Why do 
you need to use

MOV 1, 2 (which looks stupid)

when you can also use

Load R1, 2 (which looks logical)

or, even better:

R1 := 2 (which leaves no doubt at all)

Mnemonics were inevitable in times when RAM was priced per bit and cpu 
clocks were measured in kHz.

Until now, the future started in Zurich. Mnemonics are a thing from the 
past. We don't need them anymore. We have fast processors with more RAM 
than my first HDD.

I didn't see any jump, call and return instructions in the specification 
either.


--
     Groetjes

Jan Verhoeven