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From: chas@gtss.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Blitzwhat? Here're DME's timings
Message-ID: <122@gtss.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 25-May-87 18:39:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: gtss.122
Posted: Mon May 25 18:39:27 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 26-May-87 03:08:06 EDT
References: <8705240941.AA17640@cogsci.berkeley.edu>
Reply-To: chas@gtss.UUCP (Charles Cleveland)
Organization: Georgia Tech School of Physics
Lines: 43
Keywords: c

In article <8705240941.AA17640@cogsci.berkeley.edu> bryce@COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (Bryce Nesbitt) writes:
			...
>The CLI TYPE and COPY commands have a lot of overhead due to DOS and BCPL,
>the language they are written in.  It is poor measure of blitz.  Use DME..
			...
Its not a poor measure of Blitz since you can't go through life using nothing
but DME.  Well, I can't.  We gotta see what Blitz does with a variety of
applications.  I would still like to know if Type's speed was deliberately
reduced.  I haven't been running down Blitz, I just believe in quantifying
claims and making clear how measurements were made, so that they can be
replicated and understood.

A non-BCPL Copy (cp) has just been posted.  Anyone want to compare its speed
with AmigaDos's Copy to address the point raised by Bryce?  Not me, I refuse
to touch cp until it stops messing with my file timestamps.

I find people have been mentioning DME for a reason, however.  We are
fortunate that DME lets us issue commands like, paraphrasing,
	page down 50 times.
Many editors would not let us do enough automatic pagings to time them.  So
now for the results.

Using my 'standard' 73350 byte file (without clear screens, which are
superfluous in a paging environment like DME).  I was forced to use my
watch's stopwatch mode.  I got these times -- averaging over 4 trials -- for
paging through the file (strictly Topaz, of course):

Without Blitzfonts	19.56 s (Comparable with Copy with Blitzfonts)
With Blitzfonts		 5.21 s

A speed increase of 275% (the overall factor was 3.75).  That's about a
tenth of a second a page -- 14078 characters per second, guys!  Around
100,000 baud if that had meaning here.  Not bad for a cheap little box ;-).

But as I say we can't spend the rest of our lives using DME (Though it is
tempting, what?).  Now I guess I'll have to cough up the moola for the
Blitz that handles other fonts to see how its speeds compare.  I mean
nobody else is going to time these things as far as I can tell :-).
-- 
Charles Cleveland		EDU:  chas@ss.physics.gatech.edu
Georgia Tech School of Physics	UUCP: ...!{akgua,allegra,amd,hplabs,ihnp4,
Atlanta, GA 30332			masscomp,ut-ngp,rlgvax,sb1,uf-cgrl,
					unmvax,ut-sally}!gatech!gtss!chas