#Bruce Dawson Review
04-Jan-89 00:26:45
Sb: #28517-#Bruce Dawson Review
Fm: Vic Wagner 76046,3004
To: New member 73016,27
Your suggestion about assemblers displaying clocks (or time) needed for each
line of instruction is unfortunately a meaningless request. NO assembler can
possibly take into consideration all of the variables which may affect the
execution time of each instruction. And if it _could_ it would be obsolete
before any copies could be shipped (some bright engineer would 'fix' some
problem and the results would now be wrong). I believe it would be an extreme
disservice to even _attempt_ to do this in an assembler (for one, the published
numbers would be _believed_). The ONLY way to find out how long a sequence of
instructions will take to execute, is to time the sequence of
instructions…..with a stopwatch. If you're in the business of needing to
know how long instructions take to execute and you have NOT yet written a
program to 'time' the execution of an arbitrary sequence, then I suggest that
you have an interesting project to work on now.