* Lawrence Gordon writes to Marcel Veldhuizen, on Tuesday September 10 1996
   at 10:26:
 MV>> Most EXE's created by higher languages compress very well...
 MV>> QB packs them by itself, s you probably know, but not as well as
 MV>> PKLite or Diet... PowerBASIC doesn't compress the EXE's so one
 MV>> can more easily pack it with a proper packer, that's one of the
 MV>> things I like about PB:)
 LG> I have listened to people talk about the "granularity" of .EXE files
 LG> created by PB vs. QB or PDS for several years now and I've never
 LG> understood why a smaller .EXE implies "better". If that was really the
 LG> case, then we should be programming in assembler or Turbo Pascal. To
For me, seeing a massive executable is somewhat of a turnoff... being an ASM 
programmer myself I am used to being able to squeeze a lot of equivalent 
functionality into a much smaller executable.
That's why I started writing MoonRock, a freeware 'BASIC like' compiler. To 
print hello world requires an executable of 278 bytes (or 222 if you use 
extra compile switches).
(see http://www.ozramp.net.au/~rowan/ )
 LG> me, the real issues in programming are performance and speed. TP may
 LG> make smaller .EXE files, but it's string handling performance is a
 LG> dog compared to PowerBASIC. Turbo C may make fast executables, but
 LG> PB's math library is just as fast and much easier to use. The only
 LG> real performance issue in the compiled BASICs is in file i/o, where,
 LG> admittedly, C kicks butt.
                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^
Says who? You're generalising here, file I/O in any given compiler 
(regardless of language) depends on the runtime library.
Have you actually done any tests on this?
Cheers.
---
---------------