On 2018-05-01, David Taylor  wrote:

> On 01/05/2018 09:44, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>
>> But I would remind you of the possibly apocryphal tale of a yound Gary
>> Kildall, faced with a huge wad of assembler code  as an intern, who took
>> the decision to rewrite it in FORTRAN. It ran faster...
>
> My experience, and what also applies to the Raspberry Pi, is that
> optimisation of the algorithm is the most efficient way of speeding up
> software, before any consideration of assembler or C or whatever.  But
> choosing a language specifically oriented to the problem in question may
> be the most efficient use of a programmer's time.
>
> Special cases excepted, of course!

A friend wrote an 8080 cross-assembler in COBOL.  It ran rings around
the vendor-supplied cross-assembler, which was written in FORTRAN.

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