Hah! Knuth has 8x8 bit-matrix instructions in MMIX! Well, a lot of people, including me, have been saying for a long time instructions sets sucked in some easily-improvable ways. Let's hope Knuth gets listened to. He's trying harder than most of the whiners. Thing is, I think Intel actually KNOWS they've painted themselves into a corner with a fundamentally bad architecture, but they did an experiment where they tried to make+sell a better one and nobody bought it since their old x86 software would not work on it. The lesson they learned was: to hell with good architecture, the only thing that matters is backwards compatibility back to the stone age. And I think to a considerable extent the same is true with computer languages. The amount of wasted effort that has gone into creating better languages which then do not achieve commercial success and high use, is tremendous. (And human languages too, e.g. why are we not speaking Esperanto?) -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org