Ford Prefect wrote: | John, | | I think you'd be hard pressed to write a program in either C or PL/I that | would even approach the I/O performance of DFSORT. In fact, I doubt it's | possible.
This is the received opinion, but it is wrong. In C it would be all but impossible. In PL/I it would be comparatively easy in this particular situation. (In general, of course, assembly language can be made to yield noty just better but much better performance., and DFSORT I/O is superb. It is not, however, optimized for a situation in which much of SORTIN is discarded.) What can be done in statement-level procedural languages and what is usually done in them needs to be distinguished sharply. COBOL I/O is not notorious for performance, but on Thursday my wife and I shall be drinking the last two of six bottles of six bottles of Le Montrachet that I won from a colleague who judged that high performance was impossible in COBOL. (For historical reasons COBOL does better record I/O than C. Things could be otherwise if it were judged important that they should be, but they are not.) John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
