Subj : C64 BASIC - what's faster INT() or %? Plus benefits of DEF FN A()
To   : All
From : Janne Johansson
Date : Thu Apr 19 2018 10:08:48

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.

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