Re: else ladders practice

On 21/11/2024 15:50, Scott Lurndal wrote:

Bart <bc@freeuk.com> writes:

On 21/11/2024 13:00, David Brown wrote:

On 20/11/2024 21:17, Bart wrote:

>

For the routines ones that I do 100s of times a day, where test runs
are generally very short, then I don't want to hang about waiting for
a compiler that is taking 30 times longer than necessary for no good
reason.
>

>
Your development process sounds bad in so many ways it is hard to know
where to start.  I think perhaps the foundation is that you taught
yourself a bit of programming in the 1970's,

>
1970s builds, especially on mainframes, were dominated by link times.

 Which mainframe do you have experience on?
 I spent a decade writing a mainframe operating system (the largest
application we had to compile regularly) and the link time was a
minor fraction of the overall build time.
 It was so minor that our build system stored the object files
so that the OS engineers only needed to recompile the object
associated with the source file being modified rather than
the entire OS, they'd share the rest of the object files
with the entire OS team.
 

The one I remember most was 'TKB' I think it was, running on ICL 4/72 (360 clone). It took up most of the memory. It was used to link my small Fortran programs.
But linking always seems to have been big deal in that era, until I had to write one for microcomputers, then it was a simple case of loading N object files and combining them into one COM file. It was as fast as they could be loaded off a floppy.
(Given that the largest COM might have been a few 10s of KB, and floppy transfer time was some 20KB/s once a sector was located, it wouldn't have been long.)