Hm, good point. How about a +=L b for a long type? Or have a non-annotated opcode for the native machine word size (just '+') and annotated for anything sma

Hm, good point. How about a +=L b for a long type? Or have a non-annotated opcode for the native machine word size (just '+') and annotated for anything smaller (edit: anything other) - ('+B' for byte addition). An alternative and perhaps much better higher-level solution is to have typed ASM. I believe there is work done in this area (quick search gets http://www.cs.cornell.edu/talc/ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/talc/), which would allow the type to be implicit but checkably safe but for the occasional explicitly needed coercions.