Re: Why are intepreters so slow today

Lawrence Kirby (fred@genesis.demon.co.uk)
Sat, 23 Apr 1994 15:32:41 +0000

In article <CoIA8I.Msr@dcs.ed.ac.uk> pdc@dcs.ed.ac.uk "Paul Crowley" writes:

>>Under C this took 10 seconds, interpreted BASIC took 16 seconds.
>
>Acorn knew that new users would take the speed of the BASIC as a
>measure of the speed of the processor. As a result, ARM Basic is
>beefed up and optimised far beyond its reasonable utility...

This doesn't make much sense. You appear to be saying there is a point
beyond which it is pointless(!) to improve the performance of a language.
You might just as well say the same for a processor. In practice both
benefit the system greatly by being as fast as possible. There has been a lot
of software written for the Archimedes in BASIC. The fact that there isn't
even more is probably down to the fact that ultimately it still isn't
fast enough.

-- 
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Lawrence Kirby | fred@genesis.demon.co.uk
Wilts, England | 70734.126@compuserve.com
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