Editing PDP-10 (section)

====General instructions====
There are three main classes of general instructions: arithmetic, logical, and move; conditional jump; conditional skip (which may have side effects). There are also several smaller classes.

The arithmetic, logical, and move operations include variants which operate immediate-to-register, memory-to-register, register-to-memory, register-and-memory-to-both or memory-to-memory. Since registers may be addressed as part of memory, register-to-register operations are also defined. (Not all variants are useful, though they are well-defined.) For example, the ADD operation has as variants ADDI (add an 18-bit ''I''mmediate constant to a register), ADDM (add register contents to a ''M''emory location), ADDB (add to ''B''oth, that is, add register contents to memory and also put the result in the register). A more elaborate example is HLROM (''H''alf ''L''eft to ''R''ight, ''O''nes to ''M''emory), which takes the Left half of the register contents, places them in the Right half of the memory location, and replaces the left half of the memory location with Ones. Halfword instructions are also used for linked lists: HLRZ is the Lisp CAR operator; HRRZ is CDR.

The conditional jump operations examine register contents and jump to a given location depending on the result of the comparison. The mnemonics for these instructions all start with JUMP, JUMPA meaning "jump always" and JUMP meaning "jump never" – as a consequence of the symmetric design of the instruction set, it contains several no-ops such as JUMP. For example, JUMPN A,LOC jumps to the address LOC if the contents of register A is non-zero. There are also conditional jumps based on the processor's condition register using the JRST instruction. On the KA10 and KI10, JRST is faster than JUMPA, so the standard unconditional jump is JRST.

The conditional skip operations compare register and memory contents and skip the next instruction (which is often an unconditional jump) depending on the result of the comparison. A simple example is CAMN A,LOC which compares the contents of register A with the contents of location LOC and skips the next instruction if they are not equal.  A more elaborate example is TLCE A,LOC (read "Test Left Complement, skip if Equal"), which using the contents of LOC as a mask, selects the corresponding bits in the left half of register A. If all those bits are ''E''qual to zero, skip the next instruction; and in any case, replace those bits by their Boolean complement.

Some smaller instruction classes include the shift/rotate instructions and the procedure call instructions. Particularly notable are the stack instructions PUSH and POP, and the corresponding stack call instructions PUSHJ and POPJ. The byte instructions use a special format of indirect word to extract and store arbitrary-sized bit fields, possibly advancing a pointer to the next unit.{{efn|cf. {{section link|Byte addressing|Hybrid systems}}}}