Ugly Architecture

Ugly Architecture

The gruesome details of the Intel x86 instruction set are coming back to me...and reminding how much more elegant the dear departed Zilog Z8000 processor was. Even the Motorola MC68000 looks pretty good by comparison. To quote a former employee: "Segments are for worms." Even worse, all of these instructions that are tied to particular registers: ESI for string source, EDI for string for destination, ECX reserved for counters. That's part of why I found the Z8000 design so elegant--16 general purpose registers, and they really were general purpose. The only actual exception was that you couldn't index through register 0.