Scor­pio News

Compiled This and That

One thing is apparent, and seems to owe something to the growing ‘maturity’ (if that’s the word) of the software writers for PC type machines, or, perhaps it’s main frame practices creeping in. That is, as little as possible is written at assembler level. Most applications encountered seem to be compiled this, or compiled that, or they don’t say they are compiled, but the sheer size of the object code sere they must be. Now, I’ve got nothing against compilers, in fact most of what I’ve been doing over the last few months has been compiled, so I don’t knock it. But when I look at compiled object, its size says that it can’t possibly be as efficient as good old hand written assembler. In fact of course, this could not be, but it depends on where you place your benchmarks as to what determines efficiency. Taking hand written assembler as a base line, one could argue that a compiler is several hundred percent more efficient when compared with the time taken to write an equivalent program in assembler. Or it could be argued that compiled code is only some tens of percent efficient when it comes to the size of the programs created, the same applies to operating speed. Now I don’t intend to get into any arguments about benchmarks, I’ll leave that to Paddy Coker; but it seems to me that comparing the ‘goodness’ of anything must take into account all these things (and probably a few more parameters I don’t see right now) and not just confine itself to the operating speed of a program! Just how and where you adjust the trade-off, I don’t know.

Now there are compilers for this language, and that language and each has its advantages and disadvantages. Of the compilers around, I favour those languages which have matching interpreters; as an interpreted program is usually much easier to edit than one you have to recompile every time you have tweaked it. An interpreter is invaluable in the early stages of learning a language on your own, in getting round the inevitable syntax errors caused by such things as laving off semicolons on the ends of lines in Pascal and C programs, very frustrating as the compiler stops every time it hits an error. Of the languages available, I use a very few, being a very pedestrian type who hates having to learn anything new; you can certainly list them on the fingers of one hand, BASIC – fairly proficient, C – pretty hopeless, DBASE – very good (although I say so myself, I get lots of practice), and Pascal – forget it. I’ve recently heard of a C interpreter, so I’m keen to get my hands on that and brush up my C a bit. But in the main, armed with the two languages I feel competent with and a bit of assembler to ‘paper over the cracks’ caused by the deficiencies of the compilers, I feel ready to tackle most things.

Software Packages

As to applications/​utility software I use, I have found that Sidekick is perhaps the most invaluable. The major features are that it is memory resident, so it’s always available (and always knows exactly what you were doing last) and consists most usefully of a calculator in decimal, binary and Hex, a calendar with appointments dairy, and a mini word processor, well a context editor really. The context editor endears itself particularly as it is very similar in the way it works to a convenient cross between GEMPEM and Wordstar. The text is RAM resident (so it won’t handle large files) whilst most of the control codes are Wordstar compatible. There are a lot of other frills as well, including a phone directory and dialler, but I don’t use them. I’ve tried several different versions of Sidekick-like things, but still I always come back to Sidekick.

Memory Resident Quirks

Mind you, memory resident software has to be treated with a certain caution. Strange things happen. I’m told, not actually seen myself, that Sidekick hooks itself into the keyboard, looking for a certain keyboard key press combination to see if it’s required. To that end, it redirects the keyboard interrupt vector to itself for examination prior to sending on the key press to where-ever it was going in the first place. Ok, now that’s logical, but Sidekick could fall over if another program redirected the keyboard interrupt vector to Itself. Sidekick is sneaky, to ensure this doesn’t happen, Sidekick has also hooked itself into the ‘clock tick’ interrupt, so that Sidekick gets woken up about 16 times a second. On waking up, Sidekick looks at