Hi all
I watched an interesting programme on youtube the other day - it was an episode of Micro Live from 1986 [1]. Fred Harris (remember him?) was talking about Forth and doing some compiling on the Acorn Electron. The team were comparing things like Basic to C to Forth. Fred said that one reason he liked Forth was that it was fast - which got me thinking....
Nowadays would we refer to one language being any faster than another? I guess we can exclude from this debate the speed of compilation. I'd guess for most (non-climate-modelling) applications - compilation speed on modern hardware isn't much of an overhead.
So once a program is compiled - is any language faster than any other nowadays? Two programs: one in C, one in Java doing the identical job - is there anything anywhere that says one will always be faster for non-trivial applications?
Cheers
Rob
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Live
I personally find this Wikipedia page a big disappointing for a programme I seldom missed but I can't find much out there to add to it!
