Language comparisons

[Grant Edwards]

In article <9db1rb0197g at news2.newsguy.com>, Alex Martelli wrote:

>It's not enough to know what "the compiler will generate" for a
>construct (and if you can do that, your compiler is not a well
>optimizing one -- it IS quite possible for Python, but I'm
>rather surprised that "in the embedded world" optimization, say
>of C programs, is so scarce...?).

It is getting to be more common -- especially with 32-bit
processors. For most of my career I've been working with
compilers targetted at register-scarce 8 and 16 bit processors
with no pipelines and no cache. With those compilers the code
generated was quite predictable, and it behooved the programmer
to know whether indexing through an array or incrementing a
pointer through an array were faster for a particular
architecture.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  ... My pants just
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