Oppolzer - Informatik / Blog

My apologies to the list if my point is redundant, as I have not read all the
previous entries for this thread. But perhaps the word "overhead" has more than
one meaning. What is the overhead to the organization of supporting an Assembler
language programmer in salary and machine time to code and debug vs. that of a
higher-level language programmer? Execution time overhead is not the only
possible component of "overhead." Think about how many more instructions it
would take in Assembler to code this simple Fortran statement: X=Y+3. I would
code in Assembler something like this:

L     Rx,Y
L     Ry,=F'3'
AR    Rx,Ry
ST    Rx,X

Yes, I know all sorts of "faster" ways to do it and with fewer instructions. And
it could be done with only one very wise and pre-existing macro, but that's an
argument for the development of such macros, which would turn the Assembler into
a pseudo-higher-level language, but not all programming problems can be
implemented in pre-existing macros. And any higher-level language is going to
translate the example statement into more or less a similar set of Assembler
statements.

B.F.