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From: spf@bonnie.UUCP (Steve Frysinger)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: Who Wants Ada?
Message-ID: <496@bonnie.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 10-Jun-85 08:26:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: bonnie.496
Posted: Mon Jun 10 08:26:35 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 11-Jun-85 05:32:29 EDT
References: <11117@brl-tgr.ARPA> <1593@reed.UUCP> <494@bonnie.UUCP> <56@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Whippany NJ
Lines: 39

> In article <494@bonnie.UUCP> spf@bonnie.UUCP (Steve Frysinger) writes:
> 
> >Just for the record, on my DEC PRO 350 (a PDP-11/23 running RSX-11M)
> >the code generated by the Pascal compiler has consistently been 50-100%
> >FASTER than the code generated by Whitesmith's C compiler.
> >
> >The point is this: C is not necessarily more efficient than Pascal (or
> >Ada, etc).  The quality of the compiler and run-time system is where
> >it's at.  While I'm not in love with either Ada or C, the argument I
> >read on the net sounds more like defense of the familiar (C) against
> >the unknown (Ada), which is not a very open-minded frame of mind for
> >people in a high-tech, fast-paced industry.
> 
> No, it seems to me that a very different point is indicated.  About the only
> assumption Pascal makes about a machine is that characters are addressable
> individually.  C, on the other hand, requires all sorts of features: all the
> incrementation and decrementation operators, pointers you can do math with,
> ASCII, and a couple of other things.  This, not suprisingly, is very much
> like what a PDP-11 supplies.  On other machines, however, these things must
> often be simulated, or the feature is more expensive; what you get is a
> language that contains a wierd PDP-11 assembler generating code for a
> different machine.  Hence it's not suprising that the Pascal is much faster;
> consider the inefficiencies of C on a machine that is radically unlike a
> PDP-11, such as a Sperry or CDC machine!
> 
> My gut reaction is that people are afraid of ADA because of the experience
> with PL/1.  The only dialects of PL/1 that really saw much use away from IBM
> machines were the various systems languages (PL/S, PLUS, PLM, etc.), which
> were stripped of much of the high-overhead stuff and given primitives
> appropriate to a particular machine.  DOD has already stated that it will
> not allow similar languages attached to ADA.  Given the ongoing development
> of other, cheaper languages, I don't think ADA has much of a chance; the
> arrival of the first reasonable compiler for FORTRAN 8X will probably do it
> in.
> 
> Charley Wingate    umcp-cs!mangoe

If C is optimized for a PDP-11 architecture, why does it do WORSE on
the PDP-11/23 than Pascal.  Maybe I missed your logic somewhere...