Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ames!decwrl!labrea!polya!kaufman
From: kaufman@polya.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Knowing Machine Code
Message-ID: <3041@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 10 Jun 88 02:01:44 GMT
References: <13735@comp.vuw.ac.nz> <104700030@uiucdcsp> <6884@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Reply-To: kaufman@polya.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman)
Distribution: na
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 18

In article <6884@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> chi@tybalt.caltech.edu (Curt Hagenlocher) writes:

>one major reason for this is the fact that the Mac's OS is written in
>machine code, and Suntools is (as I just learned from the quoted article)
>written in (probably) C.  If you've used both, you'd appreciate the
>difference.

>I think that the availability of faster and faster machines has made 
>programmers sloppier.  This refusal to deal with machine code is just
>one aspect of that trend.

When I had the opportunity (I owned the company) I required my programmers to
use C exclusively (except for the interrupt kernel).  If they complained about
the code speed in a particular construce, I added optimization to the compiler.
The result, at the far end of the project, was maintainable code that was
nearly as fast as assembly code.  Not everyone is willing or able to do
compiler optimizer hacking... but it pays off.

Marc Kaufman (kaufman@polya.stanford.edu)