Don Guinn wrote: > Building a spreadsheet is still programming. It's just not procedural. > Entering a document with markup into a word processor is also > programming. Don't forget the old EAM machines with boards. That was > programming too. I am still impressed by that architecture as those were > machines with cycle times of as little as 3 hertz and could still > outperform today's PCs with gigahertz speeds. >
Point taken. I think many people are more comfortable with hitting recalc until the spreadsheet stabilizes than trying to understand how u^:_ works. I, too am unimpressed with the speed of current computers, especially when they are used interactively. My first personal computer was a TRS-80 Model III, with 16K RAM and a 2 MHz Z80. My current computer is about 1000 times as fast and has about 50000 times as much memory. I do not see comparable improvements in performance. In a recent post, Roy Crabtree gave examples in the same vein. Texas Instruments still uses the Z80 (overclocked to 4 MHz) in its calculators. This is a chip which has no floating point arithmetic, and does not even have a hardware (integer) multiplication. The arguments for sticking with this come down to the fact that it is good enough for interactive use, TI has mature libraries, and power consumption is low. A calculator will run for months on AA batteries. Compare this with cell phones. Best wishes, John ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
