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Design Goals for SixtyPical
(draft)
The intent of SixtyPical is to have a very low-level language that benefits from abstract interpretation.
"Very low-level" means, on a comparable level of abstraction as assembly language.
In the original vision for SixtyPical, SixtyPical instructions mapped nearly 1:1 to 6502 instructions. However, many times when programming in 6502 you're using idioms (e.g. adding a 16-bit constant to a 16-bit value stored in 2 bytes) and it's just massively easier to analyze such actions when they are represented by a single instruction.
So SixtyPical instructions are similar to, inspired by, and have
analogous restrictions as 6502 instructions, but in many ways, they
are more abstract. For example, copy.
The intent is that programming in SixtyPical is a lot like programming in 6052 assembler, but it's harder to make a stupid error that you have to spend a lot of time debugging.
The intent is not to make it absolutely impossible to make such errors, just harder.