> it seems that the stack solution took more instructions
> than the other two architectures.

Quite probably, yes. But it is not very relevant. More to the point is
how large the total instruction stream (in bits) would be for the three
variants. But for 'modern' situations the data stream is often the
bottleneck (note that this used to be different).

One of the issues that work against a (single) stack architecture is
pipelining, and hence stalls due to (data) dependencies. In a register
architecture you can often arrange instructions to avoid using the
result of a previous instructions, this is hard to do on a stack
machine.

Wouter van Ooijen

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Van Ooijen Technische Informatica: www.voti.nl
consultancy, development, PICmicro products

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