"You Won't Believe Who Wins"

[Richard Smith]

At 18:31 02/06/2007, you wrote:

>Grant Stockly wrote:
>
>>It students today learned how to program by toggling switches, 
>>maybe we'd have more people writing tight and efficient code.  : )
>
>Would the not be *light* and efficient code instead. In some ways
>the OPERATE operation was what made the older computers have
>good code density.
>With the demise of FORTRAN and the rise of C and PASCAL/ALGOL
>style languages you need more addressing modes like R+ and
>B+R+# adressing where you have only two addressing modes mostly
>Direct short and indirect.

Forgive if this has been said before, but it's surely the 
availability of oodles of cheap memory that encourages sloppy coding?
When I was ripping off Donkey Kong (the original one.......) we had 
about 32Kb of ROM to store the code, and a couple of k's RAM to 
handle things like sprites (remember them?).
I used to program the Z80 in machine code, on paper, taking care of 
the number of clock cycles a particular instruction took and looking 
to see if the same could be achieved using another instruction with a 
couple less clock cycles.
That encourages tight code.

 >C9

Richard