[Info-vax] BASIC Was: Re: Digital

[Paul Sture]

On Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:44:58 -0400, David Froble wrote:

> Paul Sture wrote:
>> One of my first uses of VAX-BASIC was to generate a bunch of FORTRAN
>> programs, and it was a good choice of tool for that.
>> 
>> However I do remember someone* posting here on c.o.v a decade or more
>> ago that he had achieved significant performance gains for existing
>> BASIC programs by converting dynamic strings to static ones.
>> 
>> * Shane Smith IIRC
>> 
> That would not surprise me one bit.  There is behind the scenes work
> associated with dynamic strings.  Not having that overhead would of
> course be faster.

Ayup.
 
> That said, isn't that what computers are all about?  Behind the scenes
> work so that things can seem simple to people?

Yes it's horses for courses.  I've always had the philosophy that the 
computer is there to work for me, not the other way around.

I heard of an interesting project in the mid 1980s.  One UK water company 
looked at the cost of a then typical team of dozens of development staff 
(maybe as many as 100) and decided that gave them a rather large budget 
to throw at hardware and software tools.  The idea was to recruit some 
top notch business analysts to drive the thing.  I don't know what 
happened to that project and can imagine all sorts of problems bringing 
it to fruition but the idea appealed to me in principle.

-- 
Paul Sture