Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 UW 5/3/83; site uw-beaver Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxj!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!info-mac From: info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) Newsgroups: fa.info-mac Subject: Re: Why is the Mac so slow? Message-ID: <2329@uw-beaver> Date: Tue, 27-Nov-84 01:23:26 EST Article-I.D.: uw-beave.2329 Posted: Tue Nov 27 01:23:26 1984 Date-Received: Wed, 28-Nov-84 03:51:53 EST Sender: root@uw-beave Organization: U of Washington Computer Science Lines: 15 From: Piersol.pasa@XEROX.ARPA The answer is that there is no good reason for MacPascal to be slow. Other languages, particularly MacForth and the C compilers run at a blazing speed on the Mac. I suspect that the Macintosh Pascal system is a little too large to fit comfortably on a 128k Mac, and therefore does a lot of disk swaps. If you think about it, MacPascal has a pretty extensive set of library routines. This is generally considered good in a compiler, but MacPascal is interpreted, and so has to load them into memory when they are called. I'm willing to bet that this is a lot of the initial load and run time. We can hope that a compatible Pascal compiler will arrive to supplement MacPascal. Then we can hope for high speed AND development ease. Kurt