Years ago on my 8088 PC with the floating point chip running STSC/APL+ I had an array of several thousand numbers which I needed to convert to character (money). Using the tools in APL this took close to a half-minute. So I wrote an assembly program where I overlapped the 8087 instruction to convert numeric to character and while it was doing that, the code in the 8088 inserted the decimal, added a dollar sign to the previous conversion and saved in an array for later display. Using that, the conversion was almost instantaneous. I never timed it, but it was orders of magnitude faster.
Loved the ability to call small assembly programs from that APL. It was very fast and easy to use. And that was my first experience of parallel processing on a PC. 2010/2/17 Björn Helgason <[email protected]> > 2010/2/17 Alex Rufon <[email protected]>: > > But I'm still transferring and loading a lot of data on the sub processes > and this is when I got this idea of converting strings to numbers. > > It was/is a common practice in APL to convert strings to numbers and > work with the numbers (integers) until you needed to present the > results in human readable form. > > There are huge databases built every night at many companies building > such inverted databases to work on with APL systems. > > The APL inverted processes built this way are very fast and worth the > slow processes doing the inversion. > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
