Faraday cages ( was Re: staticy plastic tubs )

[woodelf]

Jay West wrote:

> In theory, you are right. In practice I believe you're making too much 
> of a generalization. In school they typically teach that interpreters 
> are always slower in order to explain and drive home the differences. In 
> the real world however, that's quite simply not always the case. I've 
> written both professionally, and I've seen instances that would 
> obviously suprise you. Now if you're comparing interpreted languages vs. 
> written by hand assembler, I could agree with you. But when a compiler 
> is the one generating the object, well, you may be suprised at how 
> closely a interpreted stack machine can get to the ratio of required 
> hardware instructions given the platform.

Also at the time most floating point was done in software
for the smaller machines. The ratio on integer math 16 bit
to floating point may be the factor in most interpreted lanquges
being the about the same speed as compiled ones.
BASIC/09 for the 6809 was nice in that you could have both versons
compiled or interpreted from the same source. PASCAL was nice too
in that you had virtual memory ( crummy with a floppy ) so you could
run larger programs than 64k.

> Jay
> .
>