> Also setcc is abysmally stupid in leaving the high 3/7 bytes of the register unmodified - what were Intel's engineers smoking? It makes sense in context. Whe

> Also setcc is abysmally stupid in leaving the high 3/7 bytes of the register unmodified - what were Intel's engineers smoking? It makes sense in context. When the instruction was introduced, it made sense to have 8-bit flags instead of overwriting a whole register (remember you only have 7, and we're usually optimizing things for size at this point). You can also do SETcc of the upper 8 bits of a 16-bit register, e.g. SETNZ AH. It doesn't make sense now, true, but I've never seen it as a large annoyance; you can avoid using SETcc in favor of full-register instructions (excluding CMOV) most of the time anyway.