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Subject: Re: Can a Programming Language Cause Engines to be Slow?

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 12:55:51 11/13/02

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On November 13, 2002 at 14:59:56, David Rasmussen wrote:

>On November 13, 2002 at 13:35:51, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>
>>(3) programming language features.  loops.  block if-then-else structures, good
>>access
>>to native hardware data units, etc.  Unfortunately, the more complex the
>>language, the
>>worse the optimizer, which is why C is quite popular.  Very simple programming
>>language,
>>fairly close to assembler-level stuff, makes it fast/efficient.  More abstract
>>languages (PL/1,
>>ADA, and off into the _really_ abstract stuff like prolog, snobol, lisp and so
>>forth) tend to
>>produce slower executables.
>>
>
>Ada is not more abstract than C, if you don't want it to. On the other hand, it
>is if you want it to.
>In fact it has way better support for near-hardware programming. You can
>specifiy more precisely and portably how many bits some field of a record is,
>and how it should be interpreted etc.
>
>/David


You can do that in C with bit-fields as well, but it both it and ADA are
horribly
slow when you fiddle with bitfields.




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