Re: YAA -- Yet Another Acronym

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#2148

From: a... Al Thompson
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 1990 20:05

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In article <10...@cbmvax.commodore.com> mks@cbmvax (Michael Sinz - CATS) writes:
|In article <54...@bu.edu.bu.edu> a...@cs.bu.edu (Al Thompson) writes:
[...]
|>
|>Time out!  The opcode is a number, the letters are a mnemonic device so
|>the programmer can avoid remembering the number.  There is no necessary
|>correlation between the number of letters in the mnemonic and the number
|>it represents.
|
|Yes, however, due to memory limits, many of the assemblers were written
|such that 3-bytes for the op-code with the 4th byte containing some data
|on how to build that instruction.  It made the search/parse code really
|simple.  (My PDP-11 assembler had that until Macro-11 came out and was
|just tons better and needed a disk drive to work at reasonable rates)

Sure, but that is an engineering decision.  But, there is no necessary
correlation between the size of the mnemonic and the opcode.

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References:

<1990Mar26.115358.912@eng.umd.edu> <2309@tellab5.tellabs.com> <ENTROPY.90Mar29111836@pawl22.pawl.rpi.edu> <54248@bbn.COM> <54869@bu.edu.bu.edu> <10455@cbmvax.commodore.com>

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Path: mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!gmdzi!unido!mcsun!uunet!samsung!xylogics!bu.edu!cs!art
From: a...@cs.bu.edu (Al Thompson)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: YAA -- Yet Another Acronym
Message-ID: <54949@bu.edu.bu.edu>
Date: 30 Mar 90 20:05:21 GMT
References: <1990Mar26.115358.912@eng.umd.edu> <2309@tellab5.tellabs.com> <ENTROPY.90Mar29111836@pawl22.pawl.rpi.edu> <54248@bbn.COM> <54869@bu.edu.bu.edu> <10455@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Sender: ne...@bu.edu.bu.edu
Reply-To: a...@cs.bu.edu (Al Thompson)
Organization: Boston University
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Posted: Fri Mar 30 21:05:21 1990
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