Subj : Re: C64 BASIC - what's faster INT() or %? Plus benefits of DEF FN A()
To   : Janne Johansson
From : Shaun Bebbington
Date : Thu Apr 19 2018 01:14:37

On Thursday, 19 April 2018 08:14:28 UTC+1, Janne Johansson  wrote:
> On 2018-04-18 09:37, Shaun Bebbington : Janne Johansson wrote:
> > On Wednesday, 18 April 2018 16:41:28 UTC+1, Janne Johansson  wrote:
> >> On 2018-04-18 05:38, Shaun Bebbington : All wrote:
> >> > Thanks for the hints all. I'll do some bench mark testing or
> >> whatever :-)
> >>
> >> Please do. If benchmarking with a FOR loop over hundreds or thousands of
> >> repetitions is too hard to figure it out, then the answer isn't really
> >> important.
> >
> > Hey! Good hint.
> 
> I noticed (after sending of course) that it may have been perceivable as
> a harsh statement, hinting at lazyness or something, I meant more along
> the lines of "if you try 100 loops and can't make out the difference,
> then try 1000 loops then try 10k loops and so on, the difference might
> be so small that its not worth coding your BASIC programs with %
> sprinkled here and there for optimization reasons, but just go for
> normal ordinary readability and simplicity since performance is then
> bound by something else like algorithmic complexity and not the one-time
> conversions from ints to floats and back".
> 
> If you really need a basic program to run faster, there are a lot of
> compilers that pre-calculate and pre-parse and then make some kind of
> machine language equivalent program out of it which you can run and
> which will be lots faster. If that isn't fast enough still, code
> important parts in ASM directly or at least code it up in CC65 using
> C for some middle ground between compiled BASIC and doing it all in
> ASM yourself.

Yes Blitz BASIC seems to do a reasonably good job at this. As for C, well I 
love C. My thinking is like this: optimize BASIC, then compile. That should get 
the best results.

Regards,

Shaun.

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