CompuServe Messages

> … I am against the use of HLL's by programmers making commercial > programs if they didn't program the HLL themselves because of the errors. The idea of building all my own tools has a certain apeal to me but in reality I don't have the expertise or the time to write a compiler, and I expect that goes for most amateur and professional developers. My experience of compilers is not as bad as yours seems to be. If a compiler lets you down frequently it can be a frustrating experience. I have only come across one compiler that was that bad. I spent weeks pulling my code apart and wondering what on earth I could be doing wrong. Eventually when one of the most experienced programmers on the team couldn't find the bug either he disassembled the object code and found that the compiler was generating garbage. After that we found a few other bugs were due to similar problems and from then on I didn't trust that compiler any more. But that is an extreme case, I find most compilers are useful and reliable. Some of them may get things wrong once or twice but I can accept this as long as it doesn't happen too often. > I see that people are apparently prepared to pay double for a computer > with a speed difference of 20% so why not program in assembler and get > programs that are two, three times faster than their C equivalents? I think it is a case of fitting the development tools to the application. If you are developing the next great high speed 3D fast moving game you need all the speed you can get. IMHO most application programs do not. Most business programs are likely to spend most of their time waiting for the user to press a key or for the disc drive to give them sone data. And how many people really need an extra 25% speed? It seems crazy to me the difference in price between some 60MHz and 75MHz pentium systems. If I was buying a PC I would either go for the fastest or stick with 60MHz. I expect that most PCs these days are being sold by non-technical salesmen to non-technical customers. They aren't going to carefully evaluate the performance and work out how fast it needs to be for an application. The decision is likely to be based on "Its got more MHz so it must be better". Peter Wade Autopiloting from London, England