[skew]

That sounds like a pretty reasonable density to see savings in threaded forth code like the second post talks about (it also mentions adjusting the shift for other densities). Second, you don't need to reserve excess state at the end like that if the linker/compiler takes a little care allocating offsets so the last instructions use small indices. It definitely seems like a bit of a specialized trick, but the articles do a decent job describing conditions where it might make sense.

[danbruc]

Assuming 32 bit instructions at least every third instruction would have to be a call or jump - this seams no reasonable assumption. And if you have code with such a high density of jumps you will run into a lot of other problems, too, for example branch mispredictions and cache inefficiency due to non-locality. Maybe there is really a niche where this design has advantages but I don't think it is good for general purpose code.

[prutschman]

> Assuming 32 bit instructions

You don't have to assume, the article itself says the author is contemplating 9-bit instructions.

[danbruc]

I did not read it like that. 9 bit is not really enough for an interesting instruction set for a register machine. It is however enough for a stack machine or something similar with implicit operands, but then again you need more instructions for the same task than with a register machine.

[prutschman]

If you search for the phrase "To add more 'regular' instructions" in part 1, you'll see where he references 8 or 9 bit instructions. The author goes on, in subsequent sections, to expand the idea of tokenized jump references to tokenized instructions.

Each instruction token may only be 8 or 9 bits, but the secondary memory which contains jump targets is expanded to also contain full-width instructions.

The operating hypothesis is that just it's desirable to be able to "reach" any 32-bit destination address despite any given code segment not needing that flexibility, it's likewise desirable to be able to execute any, say, 36-bit instruction even though any given code segment only needs a subset of them.

It's really worth a read.