20 Oct
2006
20 Oct
'06
5:51 p.m.
Someone wrote....
I just had a long running argument with a clown that
insisted that
interpreted BASIC on a PCjr was as fast as compiled BASIC because the
original BASIC compiler wasn't up to snuff in his opinion.
I don't know
about the PCjr, but I have definitely seen some platforms where
an interpreted language was faster in many ways than compiled code. Most of
the ones I saw like that had the BASIC stored in a stack-oriented pCode
which was then run interpretively. One might think intuitively that compiled
code is always faster than interpreted code. That's simply not true. When
writing an interpreter you start seeing lots of ways to optimize & "cut
corners" that aren't immediately obvious. In addition, it also depends on
the underlying architecture of the machine and how the compiled code is
generated.
Jay West