Why not allow empty code blocks?

[Paul Rubin]

Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:
> But out of 20MB, I easily had *space* for a compiler. The problem was
> compilation time. I could mess around in BASIC with reasonable
> turnaround times; I could mess around in DEBUG with excellent
> turnaround times. Doing even the tiniest work in C meant delays long
> enough to go do something else.

Which compiler did you use?  Turbo C was quite fast even on the 8088,
and Turbo Pascal was even faster:

   http://prog21.dadgum.com/47.html

explains why Pascal was faster to compile than C.

F83 (Forth-83) and later F-PC also ran on the bare bones PC and were
also interactive and super responsive.  As interpreters they were slower
than compiled C, but quite a bit faster than interpreted BASIC, and it
was simple to write functions in assembly code (built-in assemblers) if
you needed them fast.  I never used any of them back then, but more
recently have been reading about them out of general interest.