Re: The Promise of Forth

On Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:46:35 -0700, Guy Macon wrote
(in article <Xc-dnR5O5_JRQHva4p2dnAA@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>):

> A few biased opinions:
> 
> A really good assembly language programmer will always outperform 
> even the best C compilers.

I think you need what we would call a really bad assembly language 
programmer. I used a Cosmic C compiler for the 68HC11 once and it produced
a 
Hello World type app that was about 80 bytes long. A bit-bang RS-232 
interface wasn't much longer and it was better than my "optimized" hand 
assembled version. Why? Because the compiler doesn't have to produce
pretty 
readable code and does optimizing tricks I wouldn't use because they are 
confusing.

It didn't write self modifying code, which I have seen too many times in
old 
assembly assembly code (truly unreadable or traceable on paper) and maybe 
that was written by a really good programmer, but I thought it was awful.
The 
Cosmic compiler consistently produced smaller faster applications than I
or 
anyone on the team could write except in very special cases where
knowledge 
of peripheral hardware could be an advantage or something like a matrix 
multiply could be inlined or sparseness taken advantage of.

-- Charlie Springer