Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!elroy!cit-vax!tybalt.caltech.edu!palmer
From: palmer@tybalt.caltech.edu (David Palmer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: FullWrite Professional
Message-ID: <6584@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: 18 May 88 16:38:20 GMT
References: <8805172016.AA09499@decwrl.dec.com> <53610@sun.uucp>
Sender: news@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu
Reply-To: palmer@tybalt.caltech.edu.UUCP (David Palmer)
Organization: California Institute of Technology
Lines: 26

>  DOESN'T IT BOTHER ANYBODY THAT IT WON'T FIT ON A FLOPPY UNLESS
>THE CODE RESOURCES ARE PACKED????!!!!?!?!?
...
>  I've seen the demo version and it doesn't look THAT much more capable
>than Word to justify an executable of that size.  

Microsoft programs are compiled to Pcode to save space.  If you look
at Word with resedit, you will see that there are about 30k of
native code for booting and interpreting the Pcode, and a ~400k
Pcode resource.

The reason Word is not as slow as you would expect Pcode to be is that
the compiler has the ability to fully compile pieces of code at the
programmer's request.  This means that the bulk of the code, which
is very rarely executed or not time-critical, takes up only a little
space, and the stuff which has to run fast is given the space it
needs to do so.

Reducing the code size also cuts down on the disk accesses, which
is a speed-up in itself.
		David Palmer
		palmer@tybalt.caltech.edu
		...rutgers!cit-vax!tybalt.caltech.edu!palmer
	"In retrospect, no one should have been surprised by the discovery
	 that Harvard Business School was being supported by a consortium
	 of large Japanese companies."  -- 1993, The Year In Review