Although these may be used singly, they are much more powerful when used together. Thus the cards should be used with caution for comparing microprocessors. They are more useful for experienced programmers and other microprocessor users who have had exposure to several different processors. The rigidity of the format of the cards means that only a certain amount of information can be included for each microprocessor. This rigidity is one of the greatest problems with the cards, especially during their creation.
Manufacturers tailor their cards to the microprocessor involved.
Because of the variety of instruction sets and tastes, this results in a great variety of programming cards. They include one or more tables of instructions sorted by mnemonic, opcode or type. This is likely to make this programming card more useful if only one microprocessor is used by a programmer. The programming cards described here only list the mnemonics alphabetically in a single table. However their uniformity makes them more useful when several processors are being used by a programmer, once there format has been assimilated.