All right, I count myself disappointed. Surely you know that "processors" don't use parentheses; the parentheses and brackets are in assembler syntax, which is long gone by the time the processor is executing byte sequences. There is nothing inherent about Intel-style syntax in physical RISC-V processors; nor in Intel processors, for that matter, as demonstrated by the fact that gcc outputs its x86-64 assembly in AT&T syntax by default. The fact that Intel syntax appears in the RISC-V spec might, at the very worst, demonstrate that the creators have bad taste in that area. If that taste has led to bad decisions elsewhere, it would be more substantive to point out those bad decisions. If not, you can configure your toolchain to use AT&T syntax and take pride in your superiority.
Bad names are harder to work around. However, about those names: "auipc" is certainly letter salad, but (a) it stands for "Add Upper Immediate to Program Counter", and its effect is to add an immediate value (multiplied by 2^12) to the program counter and put the result in a register, so the name is entirely logical given its task; and (b) except in the rare case where the PC-relative offset is exactly a multiple of 2^12, an AUIPC will be immediately followed by an add (to load a full PC-relative address), or perhaps a load-with-offset (to load a value at a full PC-relative address), or a jump-with-offset (to jump to a label at a full PC-relative address); and all three of these AUIPC+(add|load|jump) combinations are given as pseudoinstructions as well (e.g. "la" for "load address"), so the programmer will probably never need to write a bare "auipc". As for "jalr", well, it stands for "jump and link register", which jumps to the "register" argument and stores the return address in the "link" argument. There's a set of pseudo-instructions based off x0 being the "always-zero" register and x1 being the conventional "return address" register:
Pseudo Real Description
j offset jal x0, offset Jump
jal offset jal x1, offset Jump and link
jr rs jalr x0, rs, 0 Jump register
jalr rs jalr x1, rs, 0 Jump and link register
ret jalr x0, x1, 0 Return from subroutine
Seems logical enough to me. You can just use "jal offset" and "ret" if you prefer.
Anyway, if your goal was to convince me there are serious flaws in RISC-V, then criticizing the naming conventions and surface syntax has led me away from the hypothesis that you know any.
You can have a "phenomenal" processor design (Itanium was "phenomenal") in that sense, but if it's crap to program, it's not going to do it much good. As you've so aptly demonstrated, RISC-V is crap to program; you aren't likely to see any scene demos written for it, but that aside, we've yet to see whether the performance of this "phenomenal" processor will live up to the hype. Right now the closest this "phenomenal" processor has come to reality is in a tinkertoy. That's long ways away from servers and production. I still stand by my position: the mnemonics suck and compared to MC68000 or OpenSPARC the programming model is retarded, even for a RISC processor. Good luck with the hype.
Programming RISC-V will for most people be practically just like programming Thumb2,x86,etc - because they will use a standard high level languages and compiler toolchain.
Bad names are harder to work around. However, about those names: "auipc" is certainly letter salad, but (a) it stands for "Add Upper Immediate to Program Counter", and its effect is to add an immediate value (multiplied by 2^12) to the program counter and put the result in a register, so the name is entirely logical given its task; and (b) except in the rare case where the PC-relative offset is exactly a multiple of 2^12, an AUIPC will be immediately followed by an add (to load a full PC-relative address), or perhaps a load-with-offset (to load a value at a full PC-relative address), or a jump-with-offset (to jump to a label at a full PC-relative address); and all three of these AUIPC+(add|load|jump) combinations are given as pseudoinstructions as well (e.g. "la" for "load address"), so the programmer will probably never need to write a bare "auipc". As for "jalr", well, it stands for "jump and link register", which jumps to the "register" argument and stores the return address in the "link" argument. There's a set of pseudo-instructions based off x0 being the "always-zero" register and x1 being the conventional "return address" register:
Seems logical enough to me. You can just use "jal offset" and "ret" if you prefer.Anyway, if your goal was to convince me there are serious flaws in RISC-V, then criticizing the naming conventions and surface syntax has led me away from the hypothesis that you know any.