milne@ICSE.UCI.EDU (Alastair Milne) (07/07/87)
Recently I posted a request for help with what seemed unjustifiably huge
EXE files from combined MicroSoft Pascal and MS C. I have had 2 or 3
thoughtful and helpful replies so far, which I much appreciate. One of
them mentioned that with memory size being what it is these days, code
files of approx. 200K are not really a strain on memory. Which is
perfectly true, so I'd better add this qualification: we need to be able
to deliver up to 10 of these programs, or more, and we'd much prefer
to be able to keep them all on one disc, because, if the user requires,
they can chain among each other, and the support routines are not at this
moment able to do that between discs. Nor, for that matter, am I very
eager to redesign them to do so, since we must assume that the people who
will be using these programs know virtually nothing about computers, and
the less they have to fiddle with the machine, the better. So the problem
is not to fit one of these monsters in memory, but to find around 10 of
them on disc.
Not to keep striking the same sour note, but with this same arrangement
under the p-System, with programs often longer and more complicated
than these, we got 10 of them onto one 360K disc, due to the combination
of code sharing, partial virtual memory, and extremely compact instruction
format. I don't ask for such compactness with native code, but I wouldn't
mind being able to get a similar number onto a 1.2M disc.
Thanks for all the responses so far, and for any more that anybody cares
to send.
Alastair Milne,
Educational Technology Center,
U. of Calif., Irvine