The VAX is an interesting case. While it's CISC, the instruction set is, oddly enough, very regular with operands following a common structure. Each operand h

The VAX is an interesting case. While it's CISC, the instruction set is, oddly enough, very regular with operands following a common structure. Each operand has an initial byte describing the location, plus some additional bytes for displacements and indexing. Aside from the CASE statement (yes, the VAX has a table jump instruction) that can be (if I calculated correctly) up to 65,558 bytes in size, the next longest instruction are the six-operand ones that can be (again, if I calculated correctly) 43 bytes in size. Two operand register-to-register operations (and some indexed-register operations) take 3 bytes (1 for opcode, one for each register). Once you get used to it, it's pretty easy to read the actual binary code.