Re: Speedy compilers

John-the-overseer wrote:


> [The original Fortran compiler did extensive optimization (even by
> current standards) and was slow. They added a switch to skip most of
> the optimization and compile faster, and to their surprise everyone
> used it all the time, since even then most compiles were for
> development and debugging, not for production. Perhaps it's time to
> relearn this 40 year old lesson. -John]


Let me give an example of what "slow" meant. A distillation column
model that was about 3000 lines (of which many were comments) took
over a half hour for an optimized compile on a dedicated very large
mainframe of the day with the IBM Fortran H compiler. This compiler
was, to my understanding, the state of the art at that time (late
1960's).
Bob
[Wow. Fortran H was indeed the state of the art in optimizing compilers
for many years, but I never found it all that slow. On the other hand,
I was working on a 360/91 which was pretty zippy. -John]

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