On Thu, 12 Jul 2018 11:50:06 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> On 12/07/18 09:23, Björn Lundin wrote:
>> With the intent of getting an Ada waiver, a defense contractor wrote a
>> portion of its software in Ada to prove that Ada could not produce
>> real-time code. The expectation was that the resultant machine code
>> would be too large and too slow to be effective for a communications
>> application. However, the opposite was verified. With only minor source
>> code variations, one version of the compiled Ada code was much smaller
>> while executing at approximately the same speed, and a second version
>> was approximately the same size but much faster than the corresponding
>> assembly code.
>>
>> And this in a 1/4 of the coding time ...
>
>
> Gary Kildall is recounted to have, whilst a student in a summer job,
> rewritten a whole application in FORTRAN raher than assembler..
>
> It was smaller and ran faster.
>
> Which doesnt prove anythung much beyond the fact that he was a good
> coder.


or that the Assembly programmer was poor, or even simply that the
Compiler writer was a better programmer that the assembler programmer.

Another possibility is that the assembler program was more robust &
performed more error checking, making it a better* program
possibly all of the above.

There are many unknowns in this tale.

*Better is as much as being less likley to crash

--
Disclaimer: "These opinions are my own, though for a small fee they be
yours too."
  -- Dave Haynie

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