Re: P-Source: A Guide to the Apple Pascal System

[mdj <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

On Dec 4, 5:13 am, Eric <englere_...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> This sounds like a pretty full-featured JVM. I seriously doubt if you
> can be faster than Apple Pascal with this model but I do like what
> you're doing. I was alluding to the inappropriateness of this
> comparison in an earlier message. It's not fair to directly compare 2
> things that are quite different. It would be extremely exciting to
> hear that you can even come close to the performance of Apple Pascal
> with a real garbage collection and multi-threading OS, but I just
> don't want you to be dismayed if that doesn't happen.

There's at least a subset of JVM functionality that's directly
comparable. Of course, once we factor in GC & dynamic binding it
*will* be slower.

Years ago I wrote a graph plotting program for the Apple II in Pascal.
It worked well, but was a little too slow for my taste. To get around
this I wrote a 'compiler' for the expression parser which dynamically
generated a static evaluator in 6502. This plugged in via an assembly
routine full of NOPS that I linked into the program. The resulting
application was fast enough that you'd not be able to tell it was
written in Pascal at all.

While this is a greater optimisation than a hot-spot compiler can
manage (at least for now), I've always preferred this approach to
programming and am confident with some extensions Dave's work will
result in a very interesting new 'platform' for the Apple II

Matt