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From: Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>
Subject: Re: Code size of Ada ? was Re: Ada95 Strengths/Weaknesses.
Date: 1999/10/18
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In article <37FBA978.A86762F1@mitre.org>,
  "Robert I. Eachus" <eachus@mitre.org> wrote:
>     I think we are talking at cross-purposes here.  On short
sequences
> both you and can generate the sequences we want in our minds,
and
> whether we write those fragments in assembly, or build them
into the
> compiler run-time libraries is immaterial.


No, I was not talking about short sequences here. I have written
many large programs in assembly in the past (probably I have
written about half a million lines of delivered commercial
assembly code). For an example of a fairly large program
written in very aggressive assembly language throughout, about
20K SLOC, look at the 360 implemnetation of SPITBOL (note that
is a COMPLETE, very fast SNOBOL-4 compiler which fits in about
80K bytes of code -- it compiles at many millions of lines
a minute, using the TRT instruction extensively for lexical
analysis).

But I certainly do NOT recommend this style of programming,
an ASM program of this size, written in this manner, is barely
maintainable, and the number of people who can work with such
programs is minimal.

I think it is important to understand that using higher level
languages does have a cost. The objective is to keep the cost
at a reasonable level (many current Java implementations fail
to meet this criterion). With current machines, we can afford
to give up a small factor of inefficiency, but not a large
factor :-)


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