I worked with TI320 in the same time period quite a bit and remember the Tartan compilers (not Ada, though). It's easy to believe that a compiler beats a naive

I worked with TI320 in the same time period quite a bit and remember the Tartan compilers (not Ada, though). It's easy to believe that a compiler beats a naive assembly code writer. The pipelining example is a good one, it can take hours poring over the manual to figure out how to best arrange your assembly instructions to keep the 320 pipeline flowing. The compilers at the time knew some of the tricks but it was still usually possible to hand-optimize the compiler output quite a bit.