[net.micro.cbm] Speed of Oxford Pascal and C-Power

john13@garfield.UUCP (09/26/86)

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In response to the person who asked for benchmarks for Oxford Pascal and
Proline C:

If you consider Oxford Pascal alone and do some tests (say loops doing
a few thousand adds, subtracts, or whatever) you'll see that the times
for Pascal are *exactly* the same as for Basic. Apparently they hooked
right into the Basic arithmetic functions to save memory (although from
the size of stand-alone Pascal programs, it's hard to see any signs of
memory conservation). So, even though Pascal considers an int to be so
many bits, the compiler doesn't make use of special integer arithmetic.
This alone is a big enough drawback for me not to use Pascal on the 64
for any kind of calculation; it's a silly oversight, I think, since 
compiled Basic will run these things significantly faster than Pascal's
p-code.

C-Power, on the other hand, is very efficient with its calculations. I
don't know exact times, but if you need convincing, try setting up a
graphics screen and then clearing it with for (x==8192;x<16193;x++)
(*((char *)x)) = 0;. C-Power code is pure machine code, while code
generated by Pascal is run through a semi-interpreter, which is the
reason for the huge size of stand-alone Pascal programs (the interpreter
must be saved with each program).

John Russell
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