The Free Online Dictionary of Computing (http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/) is edited by Denis Howe <dbh@doc.ic.ac.uk>.

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instruction set

<architecture> The collection of machine language instructions that a particular processor understands.

The term is almost synonymous with "instruction set architecture" since the instructions are fairly meaningless in isolation from the registers etc. that they manipulate.

(1999-07-05)