Re: Crenshaw's Tutorial

> > That is the general philosophy behind all of Wirth's languages, and
> > it is no accident that Pascal compilers generally run twice or more
> > as fast as equivalent C compilers.
>
> I'd be interested to hear whether that is due to differences in
> parsing speed or to other factors. For example, the Borland compilers
> have traditionally neglected optimization in favor of compilation
> speed.


Pascal (and many other Wirth languages) can compile code in a single
pass. Most *fast* Pascal compilers I'm familiar with generally
compiled directly to executable object code (rather than producing a
relocatable object file that had to be linked). Of course, not having
to include and process a million and one include files with billions
of constants you don't use (to get the one you do use) also has a very
negative impact on C/C++ compilations. Precompiled header files help
a lot, but there is still a lot of processing time wasted on this.
The few Pascals I've used that allow separate compilation *always*
precompiled the "units" and the symbol table info needed by the code
using the unit.


Note that the latest versions of Inprise's Pascal and C/C++ compilers
supposedly use the same back end. Even so, the Delphi/Pascal compiler
is many times faster than the C/C++ compiler. This is true even after
Inprise added many features to Delphi that were stolen directly from
C++ (and affect the ability to compile the code in a single pass).
Randy Hyde

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