CompuServe Messages

>>assembler will produce the most efficient programs of them all. Absolutely correct. I have been using assembler for years, in fact most of my Amiga programs are in it. But the problem is that the larger projects get, the more impossible it is to manage them. I can't even figure what the hell is going on in AddPower anymore, and I am writing parts of it over again in C. Managing several programs of even moderate size just gets to be impossible, and then you come up against the comparisons. AddPower written in assembly is about 18K in size. Wow, pretty small for all it does. The same thing (with a much improved interface, and a few more features) is about 100K in C. So I solved the problem by making the preferences editors separate programs, so the master patch program that's always in memory is only 20K again. The whole thing may be a lot bigger… but the "efficiency" advantage of the assembly version is meaningless. The preferences programs spend all their processing time WAITING for YOU to click checkboxes. There is NO efficiency advantage to the (slightly) faster assembly versions… because they are not CPU intensive, nor are most multitasking programs that wait for input. And how relevant is 20K compared to 100K when you have a hard drive 2000 times that size anyway? Assembler code produces the most efficient programs. It is NOT the most efficient programming language… the language that allows you to create the most powerful software in the least time with the least bugs and the easiest to go back and change later is the most efficient… and that is an OOP programming language. This little piece of advice comes from one of the few (1 percent?) of Amiga programmers that actually writes software in assembly language, and I'd switch over to C++ completely if I had a reasonably decent compiler. SAS/C++ is slower than snot form a bad cold.