That tells me why it sucks from the perspective of a compiler writer in 2017. But it doesn't tell me if it sucked in 1979 in an era when ask was much more frequently hand-written and there were many more physical constraints and trade-offs. x86 seems often to be judged by later innovations like RISC. But that wasn't a thing in 1979 and sucks for hand-writing anyway - perhaps you want more complex and non-orthogonal instructions in 1979.
Someone who is familiar with the 70s and 80s will have to chime in, but I'm not sure how popular it was with assembly writers then (I don't think it was).
As someone who wrote a reasonable amount of assembler, my first exposure to RISC (SPARC) nearly blew my mind; so easy to learn and much less struggle to write well. I never understood the attachment to arcane ISAs.
Thank you. I understood most of that. I'm still curious as to 'where it all won't wrong.' If such info exists, of course.
It didn't, it's ugly because of backwards compatibility. It was cheap(transistor and engineering-wise) for Intel to add instructions in the 80's to 90's timeframe since it reduced instruction size, so they added a tonne of them. Now it looks ugly, but Intel can't reduce it because some obscure program may break.