On instruction sets and their formats

Central to instruction set design is the issue of the instruction format. Some common format encoding techniques are discussed, and a method of representing high-level language parse trees by means of formats that cover successively larger portions of a tree is introduced. Variations are introduced on the method that represent directed acyclic graphs as well as simple parse trees, and that encode constants in a special fashion. For a particular representation, the number of times each format is executed to run a sample program to completion is measured.