Path: utzoo!mnetor!tmsoft!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!clyde.concordia.ca!nstn.ns.ca!news.cs.indiana.edu!arizona.edu!cerritos.edu!usc!samsung!emory!gatech!purdue!haven!decuac!shlump.nac.dec.com!pa.dec.com!bacchus!mwm From: mwm@pa.dec.com (Mike (My Watch Has Windows) Meyer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer Subject: Re: How are some programs SO DAMN SMALL! Message-ID: Date: 15 Feb 91 15:40:55 GMT References: <91045.150604GUTEST8@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be><1991Feb15.134020.21911@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> Sender: news@pa.dec.com (News) Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica Lines: 39 In article <1991Feb15.134020.21911@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> riley@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Daniel S. Riley) writes: 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. Gee, this is getting interesting. Anyway, the small example makes the difference obvious. But assuming you've got all your libraries & i/o streams open already, how much code does it take to print a string in assembler? Someone _mailed_ me z80 assembler that did my 20 byte example in 21 bytes. I don't think you're going to do a lot better with a 68000. That's been my experience elsewhere - the two are about the same size, but one is a lot easier to write. And scripts are usefull for more than trivial things. Two examples: The Lattice/SAS install script does some pretty non-trivial operations. Yes, it takes forever. But most of that is because you're copying lots of stuff off of floppies and munging on it after it's on the hard disk. I once wrote a fish disk index system as a CLI script. It wasn't very fast, but like the SAS scripts, most of it was spent doing disk I/O, or in the sort command. After I got a pipe: device, I made it multitask by changing "ram:name" to "pipe:name" and "running" a few commands. That cut the time it took by an order of magnitude. Making that last change would have been non-trivial in assembler, and might never have been made. In that case, the "slow" cli script would have been faster than the "fast" assembler program - and taken much less time to develop.