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I enjoyed reading this piece from the same site: http://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html It's about how modern interpreted languages

by reedlaw 15y ago

I enjoyed reading this piece from the same site: http://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html It's about how modern interpreted languages such as Ruby and Python are orders of magnitude faster than BASIC's such as found on typical 1980's systems.

saalweachter 15y ago
The speedup is actually precisely what you would expect from hardware over that time period. 2^((2009-1984) / 1.5) = 104031.915 He's accidentally demonstrated that we would expect a 1984 implementation of BASIC on modern hardware to be exactly as fast as modern Python.
- Wilduck 15y ago
  Which actually isn't damning of Python at all. Python has optimized for things other than speed. I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't choose a 1984 BASIC implementation (on modern hardware) over Python for any of your projects. You can have a Better Language at no cost to performance.
  - tectonic 15y ago
    True, I expect (but don't know for sure) that BASIC was actually highly optimized to be as fast as it was.
    - bane 15y ago
      Well, it was also usually written in the local machine language as well.
SomeOtherGuy 15y ago
As saalweachter points out, it is also drawing a completely nonsense conclusion. Python is not orders of magnitude faster, he is running it on hardware that is orders of magnitude faster. It is actually about the same speed.
aaronblohowiak 15y ago
I'd wager that BASIC on a modern machine would outperform python. There are fully compiled versions of basic that are quite fast, but they aren't cool.