On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 2:47 PM, McKown, John <[email protected]> wrote: > > Of course, C programmers, as a general class, are not as good as HLASM > programmers in designing and implementing algorithms.
(Always beware of an argument that begins with "Of course, ...") Is this an assertion about C vs HLASM or good vs bad programmers? I'm not sure of what you mean by "as a general class".... as a matter of statistical correlation, I would assume that average HLASM programmers are probably better than average C programmers. But I would also assume that average HLASM programmers are 20 years older than average C programmers. Lets have a more real world discussion - Lets say that you have an HLASM and a C programmer of equal experience who are independently building the same system and they need a good balanced binary tree data structure. The C programmer could use one of several open source or public domain implementations written in C, compile it in Metal-C and be using well-tested, optimized code 15 minutes later. The assembler programmer grabs his Knuth book.... Will the assembler program run faster? I say no - in the real world there is never enough time, and the C programmer has lots more of it to spend optimizing the rest of the system. Kirk Wolf Dovetailed Technologies http://dovetail.com
