Rich kids are into COBOL

[Eric Smith]

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.