No explicit stack pointer, frame pointer, or register use conventions. These simplifications produce an architecture that is very easy to learn, and yet is still powerful enough to use as realistic illustration of a computer architecture and to run interesting, non-trivial programs . The instruction set is introduced in a tutorial manner by the ANT tutorial , and a more detailed description of each instruction and the assembler syntax is given in an appendix of this tutorial. A complete specification for the representation and execution of each instruction is given in the ANT architecture specification . The assembler has many useful error and warning messages that indicate the location of any syntax errors in an ANT program, and provide hints for how to fix them.
Students can also write their own simulator .
The ANT debugger is primarily used for helping debug ANT programs, but it can also be used to illustrate the process of executing an ANT program.