From:	jessedorland AT hotmail DOT com (Jesse Dorland)
Newsgroups:	alt.lang.basic,comp.lang.basic.misc,comp.os.msdos.djgpp,comp.os.os2.misc,comp.os.msdos.misc
Subject:	Re: OmniBasic Announcement
Date:	26 May 1997 22:47:00 -0700
Organization:	[none]
Lines:	45
Message-ID:	<338a8142.22689517@news.primenet.com>
References:	<3385F0D6 DOT 1DCE AT vax2 DOT rainis DOT net> <3387D4FD DOT 303D AT hotmail DOT com> <33889968 DOT 4148 AT vax2 DOT rainis DOT net> <338926E9 DOT 239A AT hotmail DOT com> <338A0C16 DOT EC5 AT vax2 DOT rainis DOT net> <338A6EAA DOT 45B5 AT hotmail DOT com>
Reply-To:	jessedorland AT hotmail DOT com
To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway:	from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp

>No. I was reffering to "is is". What is what? Anyway, I always mispell
>prety.
>:) ALWAYS. No matter how much I pound it into my head. rar.

I spy a hypocrite in our midst. <g>

> You miss the point here. OmniBasic is NOT written in C. It is written in
>> OmniBasic. You are right in that a pure assembly approach would be
>> faster but OmniBasic was written for portability, not speed. None the
>> less is quite respectable speed wise. Although OmniBasic is C output, it
>> is frequently faster than similar C code. This is because the C the is
>> output is a much lower (rudimentary) C than C compilers normally
>> produce. In other words the code produced is more like "univesal
>> assembler" than classic C. There is some of the characteristic
>> 'code-bloat' due to the c overhead (I.E. Hello World pgms that are 8 to
>> 14k etc). This cannot be avoided. BTW my PB32 seems to have about 30k
>> overhead and it is not c-output)
>Oh. I see. GFA produces ASM output, and a Hello World program comes out
>to
>less than 6kb. I've made things that were smaller than 3k (some times
>1.5k)
>because they don't use GFA's libs at all.
>

Gee, X-Bios, you seem to have extremely selective memory.  Even if you create
a 6kb executable using GFA-BASIC, you can't distribute it by itself and have
it work on every computer.  In order for it to work, one also has to have in
one's possession the massive **90KB** overlay file, which you continuously
neglect to mention.  That means that, if you want non-GFA users to be able to
run your programs, you have to distribute it with whatever GFA programs you
create.  It hardly amounts to 6kb then, does it?

You could alternately post the OVL file seperately for people to use with all
your programs, but what if someone takes just your executable and posts it
elsewhere?  The only way to make absolutely sure that everyone can use your
programs written in GFA is to distribute the overlay file with them.  Most
other BASIC compilers (including OmniBasic, I presume) do not need any extra
files, and consequently produce smaller overall program sizes a good deal of
the time.

-Jesse
=========================================================
There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: 
LSD & UNIX.  We do not believe this to be a coincidence.
=========================================================

- Raw text -