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From: rhyde@ucrmath.ucr.edu (randy hyde)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: Choosing a language (ML vs HLL)
Message-ID: <14104@ucrmath.ucr.edu>
Date: 1 May 91 22:17:29 GMT
References: <8867@crash.cts.com> <16005@smoke.brl.mil>
Organization: University of California, Riverside
Lines: 28


*That's* the major difference between you and I.  I have to *sell* them
once I produce them! :-)   If the quantity of my work was more important
than the quality, I'd certainly be using HLLs.  In general, I've found
the robustness of my pascal programs to be slightly better than my assembly
programs, the robustness of my C programs to be worse than my assembly
programs and the robutness of programs in other languages to be directly
proportional to how well I know the language.  The speed of the assembly
is higher in all cases (generally by a factor of at least two).

As for development time, sure, it's easier to get something working in
Pascal which is cleaner, more elegant, etc., faster than in assembly.
However, what about the time you spend optimizing the code (assuming
you need the speed)?  On projects I've worked on in the past, the combined
time of coding, testing, debugging, profiling, rewriting portions in asm,
testing, debugging (more difficult than asm alone, I might add!) turned out
to be more time than writing, testing, and debugging directly in asm.

Of course if you need portability, you have no choice.  But most people
only own one machine and only write code for that one machine so portability
is not an issue.

On the other side of the coin, I suspect that a lot of Apple owners will
be switching to something else in the next five years so perhaps portability
will begin to mean something.  It surely will if people keep writing in
C or Pascal on the GS rather than Assembly!  The 65816 is just too slow
(I believe in 17Mhz '816s when I can buy one!)
*** Randy Hyde