DEC.BANKS@MARLBORO.DEC.COM (12/17/85)
From: Dawn Banks <DEC.BANKS@MARLBORO.DEC.COM>
Someone in an earlier message made a reference to the assembler subroutine
that I distributed with my ABasiC Mandelbrot set generator, as an example of
how assembler sources could be distributed to satisfy both those who want
sources, and those who don't have a compiler. I would like to mention that
the aforementioned subroutine was hand assembled (as we didn't have an
assembler at the time), and the process took most of a day to hand assemble
and debug.
The point of this is that it did not originate from a "real" assembler
source. Furthermore, I don't know exactly how successful a person would be
in writing a processor to mung assembler sources into that format. (perhaps
munging an assembly listing into that format would make a bit more sense.)
As a matter of fact, I think the syntax used in the ABasiC bit doesn't even
match the official assembler syntax used by the Amiga macro assembler.
It sounds like a neat way to distribute sources, but I doubt that it would
be too practical.
on to a different subject:
Mr French: I've been wholly unsuccessful in sending mail directly to you, so
maybe you'll get this: Doing some trivial testing has left me with the
conclusion that you could perhaps speed up your inner loop (and therefore your
execution time) if you replaced the computation with something similar to what
we used in our ABasiC Mandelbrot program. Any interest in giving it a try?
(as a sort of "proof", it appears that our ABasiC version computes sets slightly
faster than your C code). As I've not a lot of experience coding C, I haven't
tried it myself. I'd sort of like to see it, though, as your program has lots
of neat features.
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