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From: jthomas@nmsu.edu (James Thomas)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: skip instructions
Message-ID: <1182@opus.NMSU.Edu>
Date: 1 May 91 22:51:15 GMT
Sender: news@NMSU.Edu
Distribution: comp
Organization: NMSU Computer Science
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(I'm sorry if this is an alt.folklore.computers question, but :-)

Is there a reference (or more) describing why SKIP instructions have mostly
disappeared from instruction sets?  The 704x and 709x had them, so the
PDP-6 had them (and maybe therefore the PDP-8 inherited them).  Now the
HP-PA has them hiding in the guise of the nullify bit.  Are conditional
branches generically more useful?

Thanks,
Jim