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The perennial problem for me is the bifurcation from "AT&T" and "Intel" syntax. I don't really care if register names have a $, a %, or no prefix at all. It's t

by titzer 6y ago

The perennial problem for me is the bifurcation from "AT&T" and "Intel" syntax. I don't really care if register names have a $, a %, or no prefix at all. It's the reversal of source and destination operands that is absolutely maddening. Personally I prefer that destination operands are on the left, because that tracks with assignments in normal programming languages. I don't really understand why you would want the opposite.

pjc50 6y ago
"MOV A, B" reads more naturally as "move A to B". I agree that we should just pick a convention!
root 6y ago
COBOL has MOVE ... TO ... which seems to be the logical order for a command named MOV/MOVE.
gumby 6y ago
AT&T simply adapted the assembly syntax of earlier machines, ultimately which reflected the architectures of even earlier hardware from a time when there weren't really higher level languages. Some bizarre high level conventions, like using '=' for assignment, were also adopted from earlier languages but are now commonplace.
patrec 6y ago
It becomes more natural/C-like if you think of ADD foo bar not as foo + bar but as foo += bar And then apply a prefix syntax correction, to end up with += foo bar (Or, equivalently, always mentally add the word "TO" to each operator that modifies an argument, which is most) Also, most intel instructions use one or two arguments as input, and modify one of them as output. It sort of makes sense to have the output (or input/output) argument always be in the same position, regardless of whether an instruction takes 1 or 2 args. BTW, even in riscv where "add" takes three args, i.e. the form is a = b + c, the output-only argument a comes first.
- titzer 6y ago
  > foo += bar Yeah, this is how I think about it too. It's natural to have the destination operand always as the first one (i.e. left hand side). I think the GNU tools all use the AT&T syntax (destination is last), and I hate it.

by titzer 6y ago

pjc50 6y ago

"MOV A, B" reads more naturally as "move A to B". I agree that we should just pick a convention!

root 6y ago

COBOL has MOVE ... TO ... which seems to be the logical order for a command named MOV/MOVE.

gumby 6y ago

AT&T simply adapted the assembly syntax of earlier machines, ultimately which reflected the architectures of even earlier hardware from a time when there weren't really higher level languages. Some bizarre high level conventions, like using '=' for assignment, were also adopted from earlier languages but are now commonplace.

patrec 6y ago

It becomes more natural/C-like if you think of ADD foo bar not as foo + bar but as foo += bar And then apply a prefix syntax correction, to end up with += foo bar (Or, equivalently, always mentally add the word "TO" to each operator that modifies an argument, which is most) Also, most intel instructions use one or two arguments as input, and modify one of them as output. It sort of makes sense to have the output (or input/output) argument always be in the same position, regardless of whether an instruction takes 1 or 2 args. BTW, even in riscv where "add" takes three args, i.e. the form is a = b + c, the output-only argument a comes first.

titzer 6y ago
> foo += bar Yeah, this is how I think about it too. It's natural to have the destination operand always as the first one (i.e. left hand side). I think the GNU tools all use the AT&T syntax (destination is last), and I hate it.