Guess I'll have to get my CoCo 3 back up and running so I can see how long a BASIC09 version of the sieve takes. That would be running on a (NTSC color burst f

Guess I'll have to get my CoCo 3 back up and running so I can see how long a BASIC09 version of the sieve takes. That would be running on a (NTSC color burst frequency / 2) MHz 6809 rather than the Atari's 6502, and, unlike the usual "gutter BASICs" of the era, has integer and Boolean types; also, although you can use BASIC09 interactively, the code is compiled to an "I-code" virtual machine language to be run. Ironically, The Fine Article from which the BASIC times are taken is one reviewing Action!, a compiler/IDE of sorts for a structured language for the Atari. It has an Action! version of the sieve, and cites a run time of 1.5 seconds, rather faster than 324 seconds the Atari BASIC version takes. Yes, Moore's Law and all that... but there was more to computing in those days than gutter BASIC.