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Unclear text on Instruction Set Architecture

Posted: Sat Sep 30, 2017 2:55 pm
by SeaLiteral
The page Instruction Set Architecture was written in English, but there were some mistakes in it, so despite not being a native speaker of English myself, I tried to make the English on that page a little bit more native. Now, it wasn't always clear what was meant, so some changes may have to be made by someone with a better understanding of the topic.

I can fix lexical issues such as a page saying "selfexplaining" instead of "self explanatory". But when they make the text ambiguous, the only way to fix it is to first figure out what the text was intended to mean. The word informatics (not necessarily wrong, but some languages use this in places where native speakers of English would rather use "computer science" or "information science") and spellings like *substraction could be indicating that the Instruction Set Architecture page was written by a speaker of a Romance language. On the other hand, it's mostly speakers of Germanic languages that write compound words without spaces (*stackmachines). Knowing the writer's native language was from could perhaps make it easier to figure out what was meant. Based on the spelling *Programm with two m's and a capital P found on [wiki]User:New16[/wiki] I'd say it's probably German.

The page also said that MISC ISAs aren't used anymore, but that they're always a part of CISC and RISC ISAs. But if MISC means it has to be a stack machine, I'd assume it has push, pop and some stack arithmetic (e.g. add the two numbers that are on the top of the stack) instructions. I don't think ARM and MIPS have that, and x86 certainly doesn't have one-instruction stack+stack addition. So I hope it was OK to remove the word always there.

Anyway, I'm not sure I handled "Flynn's bottleneck applies, but by using streaming extensions the chance to reduce its influence and switch to Fisher's optimism grows rapitedly." correctly. I just couldn't understand the meaning, so I assumed *rapitedly was a misspelling of rapidly and changed it to fast. Also, if someone writes a wiki page about x86, it should probably be linked to where it mentions x86 as an example of a CISC architecture. And I guess "Church-Turing mighty" and "Chuch Turing powerful" should be changed to "Turing complete". Also, I considered changing "but the most common is the NAND function" to "but NAND is the most common", but the change didn't feel as necessary, so I left it out. You could probably also just remove the word "function" from the end of the sentence.

Also, should the page mention some example of an OISC ISA? I haven't added one, since they're not really used in real devices, but now there are examples of MISC, RISC and CISC ISAs so maybe one should be added for consistency.

Sorry for being so careful when editing, but I just don't want to write something wrong on the page just because of misunderstanding the English it's written in.