[adamthekiwi]

There's a good chance you're right! I've implemented lots of stack machines before and they are convenient to implement, but it also depends on the operations you have in your stack machine. This architecture is capable of representing a stack really easily on the tape using pointers, while also being able to describe any number of memory operations with the same base instructions. I think the equivalent simple-stack-instruction-set might be more limiting in terms of how you're able to use the data on the stack for the same comparable complexity of instructions, compared to an architecture like this where you can move the tape head arbitrarily and interact with the memory in a more free manner while still achieving the same things. I think a stack machine is a subset of this machine.

I found it very simple to implement when I went to port it to the web in Rust and also when I wrote the implementation for the genetic algorithm in Python. You're right that it could be designed for better ease of use, but I was worried most about ease of compilation first and the capacity to express common programming paradigms second. Most of the ease-of-use stuff should be accomplished by the frontend language attached to the architecture.

Thanks for the feedback!!