Re: When is multiple assignment good style?

[Martin <eden_martin_fuhrspam@...>]

On 03/16/2017 10:39 AM, Sean Conner wrote:
>   This reminded me of this blog post from James Hague: http://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html
> 
> 	The sieve in Atari BASIC, using timings from an article written in
> 	1984 by Brian Moriarty, clocks in at:
> 
> 	324 seconds (or just under 5 and a half minutes)
> 
> 	The Python version, running on hardware that's a generation back--no
> 	i7 processor or anything like that--completes in:
> 
> 	3 seconds
> 
> 	Now that's impressive! A straight-ahead interpreted language, one
> 	with garbage collection and dynamic typing and memory allocation all
> 	over the place, and it's still two orders of magnitude, 108 times,
> 	faster than what hobbyist programmers had to work with twenty-five
> 	years ago.
> 
>   Read the rest for the actual punchline.
> 
>   -spc (Who's first computer wasn't even a full 1 MHz in speed)

Didn't get the point.

If we're comparing algorithms - they appear to be same. If we are
comparing implementations speed, it depends on actual hardware and
intermediate code. (And I bet memory restrictions for Atari BASIC
was orders of magnitude stricter than for Python.)

Looks like author compares programming languages by comparing
implementations. It's like comparing mathematicians by their
body mass.

But interesting question, if Lua was released say in 1982, would
it eliminated BASIC family?

-- Martin