Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> writes: > But out of 20MB, I easily had *space* for a compiler. The problem was > compilation time. I could mess around in BASIC with reasonable > turnaround times; I could mess around in DEBUG with excellent > turnaround times. Doing even the tiniest work in C meant delays long > enough to go do something else.
Which compiler did you use? Turbo C was quite fast even on the 8088, and Turbo Pascal was even faster: http://prog21.dadgum.com/47.html explains why Pascal was faster to compile than C. F83 (Forth-83) and later F-PC also ran on the bare bones PC and were also interactive and super responsive. As interpreters they were slower than compiled C, but quite a bit faster than interpreted BASIC, and it was simple to write functions in assembly code (built-in assemblers) if you needed them fast. I never used any of them back then, but more recently have been reading about them out of general interest. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
