I miss 68K coding and quite regularly wish I could be paid to do it again. The 0...

3chelon · on Sept 28, 2016

I first learned Zilog Z80, and when I started programming 68k it felt like a high-level language in comparison!

I too have written 100's of thousands of lines of 680x0 assembler and still get a warm nostalgic glow when I see move.l, add.w, etc!

stuaxo · on Sept 28, 2016

How about ARM? The instruction set also seems quite nice.

wolfgke · on Sept 29, 2016

There is no unique ARM instruction set, but three different ones that are in common use (and some additional less common ones):

There are AArch32/A32, Thumb-2/T32 (Thumb for older processors) as the two common 32 bit instruction sets and AArch64/A64 as 64 bit instruction set.

For example AArch64/A64 does not support no conditional execution (the encoding bits that are now available are used to encode 32 instead of 16 registers). On the other hand Thumb cannot encode many instructions that AArch32/A32 can. Thumb-2 was specifically developed to deliver instructions to provide equivalent functionality. If you want to look into details look at how UAL assembly is encoded quite differently into A32 or T32 instructions.

Also for older ARM processors support for Thumb was optional (though very common). On the other hand modern 32 bit microcontroller cores of the ARMv8-M series (cf. http://www.arm.com/products/processors/instruction-set-archi...) only support T32.

TLDR: Of which of these common three ARM instruction sets are you talking about in your question "How about ARM?"?