17 Feb
2015
17 Feb
'15
3:44 p.m.
On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 3:55 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
Microsoft FORTRAN for the PC was unimpressive.
Integer sieve of Erastothanes ran slower than interpreted BASIC!
I don't know about the PC or TRS-80 versions, but for stuff I did,
Fortran-80 for CP/M (introduced July 1977) was noticably faster than
Microsoft BASIC-80 for CP/M. IIRC it produced native code with lots
of calls into the runtime library. Floating point arithmetic
performance was probably about the same as BASIC-80, but the compiled
code never had to search memory for the location of variables or the
line numbers of GOTO/GOSUB branch targets.