← Back to context

Comment by inkyoto

2 days ago

The correct assembly syntax is a matter of convention and personal preference – not a category error.

Historically, some ISA's have adopted the «src, dst» convention, whilst others have preferred «dst, src». We should be grateful that no engineer, in a moment of excessive creativity, attempted boustrophedon – a conceptual device solely appropriate to the likes of INTERCAL. Then we have 3 operand RISC instructions.

As with so many technical orthodoxies, the first convention one encounters tends thereafter to acquire the status of natural law.

The consistent application of the same convention is useful nevertheless. It reduces the unnecessary cognitive overload once one starts jumping across multiple hardware architectures.