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From: billw@navajo.STANFORD.EDU (William E. Westfield)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Assembly vs HLL debate
Message-ID: <1250@navajo.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Tue, 23-Dec-86 16:11:23 EST
Article-I.D.: navajo.1250
Posted: Tue Dec 23 16:11:23 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 24-Dec-86 00:14:33 EST
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 31
Keywords: Hah!


People have repsonded to my message (compilers use expenisve function
calls, etc) by saying "gee, use a good compiler, it will code functions
inline and optimize calling sequences as well as an assembly
programmer".  I say Hah!  Does anyone know of even one example of such
a compiler?  In line functions ought to be pretty machine independent,
and since one of the claimed virtues of HLLs is transportability,
please specify a compiler (or set of compatable compilers) that runs on
several different machines, say 8086, 68000, and Vax...  (gee, you mean
that my wonderful program that runs almost as fast as assembly on my
vax runs 10 times slower on your sun?  That's too bad - Its not MY
fault, wait for a better compiler...)

I might just as well say that all programs should be written in
structured, transportable assembler, discounting the fact that such a
thing doesn't exist.


Another response (to my explantion of how a PUSH function written
in Pascal might work), was essentially "dont use pascal, use a
language where the stack can be directly manipulated by source
statements" (I think LisP was suggested).  Get serious.  This is
a HLL vs ASM debate, not a Lisp vs Pascal debate.  Very few HLLs
allow direct manipulation of the stack.  Like it or not, Pascal is
a popular HLL that implements all those things that the HLL advocates
claim are important (range and type checking, data and program
structures, and so on).  To throw it out just because PUSH and POP
are so inefficient is ridiculous.  I was just pointing out this
was a common slow-down for HLLs...

BillW