[ColinWright]

Well, there's no point in getting out of shape about it, and I've got lots of other more important things to do than trying to convince you of this, but it seems to me that learning 6502 is already pretty useless as compared with learning something like ARM7 or StrongARM. Even there the assemblers still use TLAs for the operations. I honestly feel that it just seems right to maintain the contextual relevance and, in some sense, the culture of assembler.

If you want readability then by all means use Python or Go or Ruby or something like that. I don't know anyone who writes in assembly who doesn't use the TLAs (or similarly concise designations) for the operations, no matter what processor they're using. In feels to me like there is something natural about it.

But even beside that, I personally find that abbreviations make it easier to think in whatever subject I'm working on. When I write in assembler I think "MOV" - I don't think "move". Jargon in any field is there to make communication faster and more effective, and linguistics says that common expressions gets shorter over time.

So I think you're trying to improve the wrong thing, and while to some it may seem obvious that spelling out operations more verbosely and making them more obvious will help people learn, I'm not convinced. Sometimes concise, precise and semi-opaque terms can actually help learners.

[ralph]

I thought the original post was wrong to choose 6502. "So, it was designed to be written by humans. More modern assembly languages are meant to written by compilers, so let’s leave it to them. Plus, 6502 is fun. Nobody ever called x86 fun." I assume he's never written ARM. It was designed to be written by hand, is delightful to write, much more orthogonal than 6502, and still relevant today.

[tmzt]

STA didn't mean store address anyway, what would your long neumonics for store X or store Y be?

Having learned 6510 asm when I was younger, mov always seemed backwards and magical to me.