[ale] Linux kernel

[Steve Litt]

Thanks maddog!

I would have figured the lexical analysis would have gotten rid of the
comments right away so nothing downstream had to deal with it. If I
ever get to the point where my Stylz compiler is too slow, I'll write
back to you for advice. Right now my level of understanding is so low
that it sounds like a pipedream, but I think I can do it.

Copy that on comments making trouble with paper tape and 300 baud
modems. In fact, my buddy Bill who is a huge Foxbase expert, told me
around 1987 that for performance reasons he had to keep variable names
short in software he wrote in Dbase. After all, Dbase was an
interpreter so it had to be reparsed on every execution. Ugh!

Speaking of all that, what do you know about P-Code?

Thanks,

SteveT

Jon "maddog" Hall said on Thu, 16 Nov 2023 07:43:09 -0500

>Steve,
>
>Different compilers are written in different ways, but in general you
>are right.   Compared to the lexical analysis, syntactical analysis and
>optimization stages (ESPECIALLY OPTIMIZATION) the tokenization stage
>(which includes removing comments) is a blip in the timeline of
>compilation.
>
>I will say that comments DID have a real impact when compilers were
>reading in source code on paper tape on an ASR-33 Teletype, but that
>was the last time I even considered the issue oft compilation time
>being slowed down by comments.
>
>md
>
>On Wed, Nov 15, 2023 at 10:08 PM Steve Litt via Ale <ale at ale.org>
>wrote:
>
>> Jon "maddog" Hall via Ale said on Wed, 15 Nov 2023 19:28:38 -0500
>>  
>> >The other thing that surprised me was the passage that said
>> >"Comments just slow down the compilation".
>> >
>> >Paaaaleese!  Even the heaviest commented source code on a compiled
>> >program would be a breeze for the compiler to handle.  This excuse
>> >is fake news.  
>>
>> Maddog, is the first step, before lexical analysis, replacing all
>> space characters and newlines with tokens so the lexical analyzer
>> sees the program as a single string?
>>
>> If that's the case, I can see where // to the next linefeed and /* to
>> the next */ would be very fast.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> SteveT
>>
>> Steve Litt
>>
>> Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
>> http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21
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SteveT

Steve Litt 

Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21