Faraday cages ( was Re: staticy plastic tubs )

[Jay West]

Someone wrote....
> I just had a long running argument with a clown that insisted that 
> interpreted BASIC on a PCjr was as fast as compiled BASIC because the 
> original BASIC compiler wasn't up to snuff in his opinion.
I don't know about the PCjr, but I have definitely seen some platforms where 
an interpreted language was faster in many ways than compiled code. Most of 
the ones I saw like that had the BASIC stored in a stack-oriented pCode 
which was then run interpretively. One might think intuitively that compiled 
code is always faster than interpreted code. That's simply not true. When 
writing an interpreter you start seeing lots of ways to optimize & "cut 
corners" that aren't immediately obvious. In addition, it also depends on 
the underlying architecture of the machine and how the compiled code is 
generated.

Jay West