🚀 go-pugleaf

Please do NOT take this seriously!

In article <6063@lanl.gov>, jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
> As to whether C coding is effective, I can only judge from
> experience.  Every code that I've ever recoded from C to some other
> language runs _faster_ in the other language.  This is a _uniform_
> observation with no exceptions _at_all_.

I'd _love_ you to recode some C programs into Lisp for me.

(I'd also like to see you recode my screen editor in Cobol. <grin>)

> This _may_ be that the C
> code available to me is abnormally bad.  But, it seems unlikely.  It
> seems more likely that the C code I've seen is typical.

I would argue that it is typical in being abnormally bad.
I suggest that the basic problem in the text I've quoted is that
C is a good language for people who know what they are doing, but
that there is rather more crud around in C than Sturgeon's Law would
predict, and that Jim Giles is just a better programmer than most.
Certainly someone who knows about Fortran 90 has more ways available
of thinking about a program than someone who only knows the two
nearly identical languages C and Pascal (gee, it would be nice if C
had arrays).

Bearing in mind that every time I've recoded from Pascal or Fortran
into C, I've had a speedup, and that 2:1 ratio in the speed of code
produced by different C compilers on the same machine is quite common,
may I respectfully suggest
	[here comes the serious bit]
that if anyone wants to argue "my language _is_ faster than yours"
they present actual examples (such and such a program available by
anonymous FTP from such and such a site) with hard numbers, and
that people wanting to argue "my language _could_ be faster than
yours" remember that a major factor in determining whether it _will_
be faster is the _market_ for better compilers?  (Does anyone sell
high-quality Jovial compilers for Encore Multimaxes?  I doubt it.)
	[end of serious bit]

I'm reminded of a debate we had when I was an undergraduate.
The topic was "will high-level languages effectively replace
assembler?"  Both sides were wrong, the answer was "no, but C will".

-- 
The problem about real life is that moving one's knight to QB3
may always be replied to with a lob across the net.  --Alasdair Macintyre.