The comments are essential, and they should motivate (instead of describing) an instruction sequence.
On the other hand, familiar instruction sequences don't have much charm for me. They are, I think, more likely to lull readers to sleep than to be 'more comprehensible'. I, at least, sit up when I see an unfamiliar instruction sequence. I strongly prefer jumps to branches for all of the obvious reasons. Retrofitting them into existing branch-based code is, as I have said before, a bootless undertaking; but new code should use them all but exclusively. The whole base-register-displacement scheme and its limitations should be chucked out, except in the very few special cases in which it is still needed. Elegance and brevity are finally more important than parsimony, and relative displacements are neater and cleaner than the old alternatives to them. --jg
