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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2025 22:40:19 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On Tue, 11 Mar 2025 22:41:48 +0100, Terje Mathisen wrote:

> I.e having the target on the left is the only one that makes sense to 
> me.

One of the early programming languages I came across was POP-2. This was 
fully dynamic and heap-based, like Lisp, but also had an operand stack. So 
a simple assignment statement looked like

    a -> b;

but this could actually be written as two separate statements:

    a;
    -> b;

The first one pushed the value of a on the stack, the second one popped it 
off and stored it in b.

This made it easy to do things like swap variable values:

    a, b -> a -> b;