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From: ins_anmy@jhunix.UUCP (Norman Yarvin)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Another 1.3 wish.
Message-ID: <5151@jhunix.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 9-Aug-87 01:07:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: jhunix.5151
Posted: Sun Aug  9 01:07:06 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 9-Aug-87 21:46:06 EDT
References: <8707190424.AA10158@cogsci.berkeley.edu> <434@sugar.UUCP> <3664@well.UUCP> <4564@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: ins_anmy@jhunix.UUCP (Norman Yarvin)
Organization: JHU
Lines: 29

In article <4564@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike (My watch has windows) Meyer) writes:
>In article <3664@well.UUCP> ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo (My glasses have gate arrays) Schwab) writes:
><Compilers can do a good job, but never as good as a human.
>
>That's what you get for dealing with shoddy compilers - which most C
>compilers qualify as. A good compiler will optimize thing to a degree
>that most humans can't match. A good example is that VMS C (one of the
>exceptions to the above; I'm not meaning to slight anyone, it's just
>the one I'm familiar with) takes something like:
>

Note that the small size of machine-language programs as versus C programs
is almost all due to the use of library functions and C startup code
(especially on those machines which don't support a Unix-like environment
too well.)

A case in point: I wrote a C program to perform a subset of the functions of
the system's "who" program.  At first it was about 10K of program.  Then I
cut out all the calls to high level I/O routines, and the resulting program is
about 2.5 K.

Of course it took a little thought to do that bit of optimization, even.

The moral of programming: What you get is the time you spend, except in COBOL.

							 Norman Yarvin
(seismo!umcp-cs | ihnp4!whuxcc | allegra!hopkins) !jhunix!ins_anmy

	"Almost doesn't count. But it almost does."