knudsen@ihnss.UUCP (12/04/84)
((( mixed marriage ]]] but well balanced... My apologies -- I rooted around in the Basic09 manual this weekend and yes,jej, B9 uses 40-bit floats just like RS Basic. That makes C look even slower. Also, I tried to speed up the C programs by redeclaring all the floats to doubles, so as to avoid the conversions. Absolutely no visible change. But I think you other guys on the net have pinpointed the reason-- C insists on doing everything in 64 bits, needed or not. That could quadruple the mult and divide times! Yes, the little white bible sez it's all done in double -- I had mistakenly thought that only function arguments were expanded to doubles. Seems awful stupid, but I guess C saves a little library space by not having to maintain 32-bit operators. Hurts to see something this wrong in my favorite language ... mike k