Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!batcomputer!riley From: riley@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Daniel S. Riley) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer Subject: Re: How are some programs SO DAMN SMALL! Message-ID: <1991Feb15.134020.21911@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> Date: 15 Feb 91 13:40:20 GMT References: <91045.150604GUTEST8@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be> Organization: Cornell Theory Center Lines: 23 In article <869@caslon.cs.arizona.edu> dave@cs.arizona.edu (Dave P. Schaumann) writes: >Really, to be strictly accurate, you should include all the AmigaOS support >code in your code size, too. The characters "echo hello world" aren't some >magic incantation your Amiga instinctively knows what to do with. It takes >some kind of shell, which will call c:echo, c:echo, which in turn calls >Intuition code. A truely fair measure of how large "echo hello world" is would >take into account *all* of the code executed to bring those characters to your >screen. If you do this, you have to do it consistently. That means you have to count the DOS, Console, Intuition, Graphics and Exec code used by the 10 line assembly program that opens DOS and jumps to _LVOWrite. Pretty soon, this gets pretty ridiculous. If you want to exclude ROM routines, I'll want to exclude libraries that I already have loaded and open, and we're back to Mike's position. Regardless of all the flames, I think there are two valid points Mike's example makes--that "Hello world" is not the definitive test for the utility of a language, and that assembly isn't the ultimate language for every job. -Dan Riley (riley@theory.tn.cornell.edu, cornell!batcomputer!riley) -Wilson Lab, Cornell University