Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!munnari.oz.au!mel.dit.csiro.au!latcs1!stephens
From: stephens@latcs2.lat.oz.au (Philip J Stephens)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: CRCs
Message-ID: <1991Apr28.060142.19544@latcs2.lat.oz.au>
Date: 28 Apr 91 06:01:42 GMT
References: <13769@ucrmath.ucr.edu> <15953@smoke.brl.mil> <13959@ucrmath.ucr.edu>
Organization: Comp Sci, La Trobe Uni, Australia
Lines: 31

Randy Hyde writes:
>Two projects, in particular, come to mind.  One was an editor, the other
>was a runoff type program.  On the runoff program I spent as much time
>recoding portions of the program as I did writing it in Pascal in the
>first place.
>It ran only twice as fast when I was done, which wasn't fast enough.  I
>re-wrote it in assembly and it ran about ten times faster than the
>hybrid version.  
>I had similar results with the editor.  BTW, rewriting it in assembly
>took less time than hacking up the Pascal code with assembly.

  I would agree with Randy here.  People have been saying that the
time to write and debug a program in assembly is much more prohibative
than writing and debugging the same program in a HLL.  I disagree
with this point; if you're a bad programmer, then you'll do just as
bad a job in a HLL as you would in assembly.  But if you're a good
programmer, you'll be able to write in assembly just as fast and as
well as in a HLL.
  Of course, I do agree with the statement that you shouldn't
choose assembly over an HLL unless it is obvious that you're going to
run into speed problems.  There's a real art to debugging an assembly
language program, one that requires years of experience to develop.
Not that it's all that different from debugging a HLL program; just a
little trickier.

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<  Philip J. Stephens                ><   "Many views yield the truth."       >
<  Hons. student, Computer Science   ><   "Therefore, be not alone."          >
<  La Trobe University, Melbourne    ><   - Prime Song of the viggies, from   >
<  AUSTRALIA                         ><   THE ENGIMA SCORE by Sheri S Tepper  >
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