ncoss@abnjh.UUCP (Scott D. Allen) (04/11/84)
[Into the bit bucket] The latest issue of BYTE magazine, April 1984, has a preview article of Macintosh BASIC, which I assume is now called MacBASIC. The article was very good in that it desrcibed the general operation of Macintosh BASIC. The idea of a semi-compiled language is very interesting. Anyway, the author also included some benchmark programs and times for this version of BASIC. I put the same programs through MICROSOFT BASIC on the Mac and here are the results. TEST Macintosh BASIC Microsoft BASIC (seconds) (seconds) Empty GOSUBs 3.0 8.0 Empty FOR/NEXT loop 1.5 5.0 Midstring search 9.0 22.0 Real Division(by 3) 18.0 32.0 Integer Division(by 3) 3.0 xxx * Eratosthenes Sieve 31.5 ** 1 min. 45.0 sec ** All times for Microsoft BASIC were done using Mac's clock which only gives time in whole seconds. * I could not find an equivalent function in Microsoft for Integer functions. ** Macintosh BASIC used short variables for the Sieve and found 1899 prime numbers in 8191 numbers. Using 2-byte integers (as Microsoft calls them), I could only DIM an array for a maximum of around 6500. That's the time presented. By using regular integers, I could only use around a 1000 element array.