Bernd Since we're telling stories, this reminds me of a time in the early 1970s when IBM was "pushing" PL/I.
I was in a technical support centre and a salesman called me in order to ask - presumably "pass on" - a question. He said that it was known that PL/I carried an "overhead" but "What was the "overhead" with assembler?". I answered with as much sympathy replacing the natural scorn as I possibly could! But now, having read this thread, I wonder if I gave the right answer! Chris Mason ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bernd Oppolzer" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, April 05, 2011 10:01 AM Subject: Re: CPU: ASSM vs ENTERPRISE COBOL That reminds me of an old story where someone tried to test the performance of programming languages by coding the following short program in PL/1 and ASSEMBLER (this was on the now historic Telefunken TR 440 hardware): SUM = 0; DO I = 1 TO 100000; SUM = SUM + I; END; PUT SKIP LIST (SUM); The result was: PL/1 was much much faster, because the optimizing compiler unrolled the loop and completely performed the computation during compile time and simply generated code to print the result. This was the MULTICS PL/1 compiler, which was sold to the Telefunken company and ported to the TR 440. The ASSEMBLER programmer, of course, coded the loop. Kind regards Bernd
