Faraday cages ( was Re: staticy plastic tubs )

On 21 Oct 2006 at 10:07, Jay West wrote: It all depends on the language and the work to be performed. Certainly, "tokenizing" can cut down on scanning time without affecting program readability, but that's more a form of input editing than compilation. If the operations performed by the language are complex or time- consuming, then the interpretation overhead is just a small portion of the overall execution time and doesn't matter very much. For example, given the nature of operations in a language such as SNOBOL4, I wouldn't expect that the difference between interpretation and compilation would amount to much. The point being that there's more to a compiler or interpreter than the symbol manipulation. Clever run-time routines can make a huge difference. Consider another common statement, "Native code is faster than P-code". Maybe not... Way back when in the 8-bit world, I was on a project to do a commercial BASIC. We were given free reign of choices, from strict interpretation to compilation to native machine code. Given the operations that BASIC programs tended to perform (lots of floating-point math, string manipulation and I/O) and a requirement that the run-time be multi-user, we determined that compile-to- machine-code had no special benefits and would actually be a detriment (hard to relocate dynamically and lengthy), we used a incremental compile to a P-code and concentrated on making math and string operations very efficient. The vindication came sometime later when we were showing our system at one of the trade shows (Comdex/ NCC? -- I don't remember) and Microsoft was demoing their brand-new compiled Basic-80. A bunch of attendees decided to run benchmarks among the various BASICs. We blew M$ out of the water--in spite of their compile-to-machine code approach, their string handling was dreadful. We actually sold quite a few systems with multitasking (up to 5 way) on a single 3.5 MHz 8085 running the usual suite of small business apps, most of which were ported from the MCBA suite for a DG Nova. Cheers, Chuck