> The old school that thinks 80 mips is a lot is used to > really well written programs, written in assembler to > be efficient in both CPU and storage. The new school > that uses Java and C++ has different objectives.
I once wrote a data input and validation system for a 360/25 that processed transactions as fast as a 2450 card reader could read them - 1,000 a minute or so. 250,000 lines of code in total. But this argument is as old as the hills. Back in the early 1970s, IBM dropped support for COBOL "E" and we were forced to go to ANSI COBOL "U". The compiler was a dog - it needed 96kb (COBOL E ran in 48kb) and the code was awful. We had to buy one of the COBOL optimiser packages from an ISV - when we compared the resulting object code, it was exactly the same as our COBOL E compiler produced. But _that_, of course, wasn't "supported". So we wound up having to redefine partitions and run post-processing steps to get the same code we'd had before in the blick of an eye. It was a bank, BTW. -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.com +44 7785 302 803 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
