Xref: utzoo comp.arch:10575 comp.misc:6527
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!baum
From: baum@Apple.COM (Allen J. Baum)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.misc
Subject: Re: TRON (a little long)
Message-ID: <33015@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 10 Jul 89 18:45:10 GMT
References: <32424@apple.Apple.COM> <226@arnor.UUCP>
Reply-To: baum@apple.UUCP (Allen Baum)
Organization: Apple Computer, Inc.
Lines: 32

[]
>In article <226@arnor.UUCP> uri@arnor.UUCP (Uri Blumenthal) writes:
>From article <32424@apple.Apple.COM>, by baum@Apple.COM (Allen J. Baum):
>> How about because the TRON hardware architecture is a really ugly
>> CISC architecture which looks worse to build in hardware than the
>> only somewhat ugly CISCs we already have to deal with.
>>
>Sorry, but I don't remember such terminology in Computer Science - ugly,
>nice, beautiful...
>
>More specific, please? Efficiency,performance,instruction set (oh, it's CISC, 
>but you probably know how WIDE this term is now, don't you), features? Is it
>something like iAPX-432 (I mean - ideas)?
>
>P.S. Don't waste time flaming me - I'd rather like a technical answer.

Well, it appears that the request for no flaming didn't work. Oh, well, sorry.

To answer your question, the TRON architecture has lotsa opcodes, and many more
lotsa addressing modes. Instructions range from 16-160 bits (this is probably
an exaggeration, but I can't find my documentation on it right now, and it is
a nice round order of magnitude :-) ) I seem to recall that addressing modes
are more like addressing expressions.

As a hardware guy, I would maintain that this is not only hard to build, but
very difficult to make go fast, unnecessary, and therefore, "ugly". A friend
of mine who worked on a compiler for TRON thought it was an incredible mess
to compile for. More hearsay.

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