When is a word not a word?

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

Great. Somebody please propose a sensible nomenclature and we can adopt it.
It needs to say what the arguments are in a machine-independent way, and it
also needs to map them onto registers in the spec where appropriate.  If at
all possible, the interface spec for an object should be appropriate for
both 32- and 64-bit machines.

The VAX is a 16-bit machine at heart. The alpha people followed VAX
nomenclature for political reasons.]

shap