The ironic thing is that the performance analysis paper [*] found that the weird bit-aligned instructions iAPX 432 didn't actually help code size. "Although th

The ironic thing is that the performance analysis paper [*] found that the weird bit-aligned instructions iAPX 432 didn't actually help code size. "Although the 432 has bit-variable length instructions, it requires more space than either the 68000 in Pascal or the VAX in C. Reasons include the lack of immediates and the inability to refer to a local variable or constant using fewer than 16 bits of address." (From a modern perspective, the test programs are absurdly small: 120-2900 bytes. Nowadays, you probably couldn't even create a program that small.) [*] https://archive.org/details/PerformanceEvaluationOfTheIntelAPX432/page/n3/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/PerformanceEvaluationOfTheIntelA...