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Answer:

For convenience and throughput. It would be very tedious and error prone to write programs using only the minimum set of instructions required.


Convenience and Throughput

shovel

Convenience is important for programmers. It is easier to write programs if there are many operations available. For example, it is nice to use an integer add instruction rather than constructing integer addition using many fundamental logic operations.

Convenience is not just for human programmers. Compilers and other systems software output machine code. Compilers are easier to write and are less buggy when there is a rich set of instructions.

Throughput is how much computing a processor (or full computer system) can perform in a unit of time. Say that a processor can perform 50 million instructions in one second. The more computing each instruction does, the greater the throughput. So most processors have instructions that do much more than the bare minimum.

A crude analogy comes from the realm of digging ditches. A simple shovel could, in principle, be used to dig any hole that could be dug. It has full "shovel power." However, a power excavator can dig bigger holes much faster, and a fleet of power excavators can dig enormously big holes much faster than a single shovel.


QUESTION 6:

Are some programming languages more powerful than others?