Martijn Iseger wrote: > Hello Steve, > > >>1. Any organisation that can talk about "a leap in productivity of >>400% from Assembler to BASIC" as though nothing occurred in between >>suffers such a total disconnect from computing history that it's hard >>to take other utterances seriously. > > > I believe the point being made by the organization is that during computing > history the most successful shifts in productivity were achieved by similar > shifts in raising the abstraction level on which developers specify > solutions. > According to Capers Jones Software Productivity research Fortran is 4.5 times > more productive than Assembler. Looking at chronology I'd say it is not > incorrect > to refer to the advent of compilers as a leap. > Neither would I. I was simply pointing out that BASIC wasn't the next thing after assembly language. Even before Fortran there were a whole bunch of what were usually called "autocodes", one of the more popular ones in Britain at least being EMA (extended Mercury autocode. So it wasn't really a leap, more a sequence of steps.
I could promote nuclear weapons as being a quantum leap above rock-throwing (millions of percent more kill efficiency), but I'd be falsifying the picture by omitting depressing centuries of weapons development in doing so. Most BASICs weren't compiled languages anyway: BASIC's primary feature was the introduction of interactive execution modes and immediate edit/run cycling. The addition of compilation to machine code is a relatively recent phenomenon for (only some) BASICs, unlike other high-level languages. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC www.holdenweb.com PyCon TX 2006 www.pycon.org -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
