Thanks for the link to that thesis! Appendix E describes I believe what Hive does: a separate bit associated with the operand selector is used to control pop b

Thanks for the link to that thesis! Appendix E describes I believe what Hive does: a separate bit associated with the operand selector is used to control pop behavior. I'll have to credit this paper in mine (nothing ever really new under the sun). For the rest of the paper, if you look at his "optimized" code there are still a ton of stack ops going on, which are time wasters IMO. This is why three operand machines "won" the techno shootout, a very useful move is included with every instruction. In contrast, well written Hive assembly contains very few time wasting copy / move / pop instructions (for a two operand machine).