[Coco] C versus Pascal, etc.

[KnudsenMJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/8/05 5:36:18 PM Eastern Standard Time,  
neilsmorr at hotpop.com writes:

No, far  from it, but I find C Compilers for small CPUs are not very
efficient or  effective. It's a popular fetish these days to use them but I
found Pascal  worked better on tiny systems.



The funny thing about our Coco's OS9 C compiler is that its code is very,  
very efficient at the expression or even statement level -- it knows the 6809  
like an old glove.  But across one statement to the next, it's pretty  dumb.  
Other than its insistence on sign-extending every char to an int,  it's pretty 
good.
 
Of course, it helped if you wrote compounded expressions like
    if( (x = y + z) > 0) ...
which, I understand, are becoming passe' in these days of self-optimizing  
CPUs.
--Mike K.