When I was young i loved 6502. Instructions there were designed by
    programmers not from hardware developers. It was a pleasure to write
    programs for this chip in assembler. I used an assembler that had only
    one instruction of jump somewhere and decided itself which one used.

"smart" assemblers (and/or instruction set specifications) that use a more
limitted set of mnemonics and generate different formats and lengths of
instructions depending on the actual arguments are a mixed blessing.  In my
opinion, you can get away with it if your instruction format is fixed enough
that the generated instructions are the same length, or maybe if instruction
length is somehow irrelevant (which doesn't happen much any more, but it's
certainly easier in an architecture without "skip" instructions...)

I wrote a fair amount of 8086 assembler in the early days of the IBM PC, and
found the "strongly typed" nature of the asembler to be really annoying, for
instance.  If you had:
        data    dw 10,0xdead, 0xbeef, 0x0
        mycode  mov al, data
You'd get an error (because data it a "word", and al is only byte qide.)

Grr.
BillW

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