Concluding remarks

Rather than presenting a particular instruction set in detail, even if it is the most widely used, this article has presented the general characteristics of instruction sets, by examining the main features: instruction length, data and instruction format, ways of implementing the basic constructs of high-level languages at instruction level.

Readers wishing to program in assembler, or to insert assembler instructions into a program written in a high-level language, need to take a closer look at the characteristics of the instruction set used. The aim of this article is to help you understand, within a particular instruction set, what is common to all instruction sets and what is specific to a particular instruction set, depending on the history of that instruction set and/or its field of application.

The beginning of the 21st century has...