Job M. van Zuijlen wrote:
> 
> This is an interesting exchange.  Your final remark makes one wonder how
> much improvement there has been in software development/techniques as
> far as speed is concerned.

Well, that makes a lot of sense to me. Csound and the Music-N family
were developed when hardware was a lot slower than it is now. So there's
less pressure on developers to make their code run as fast as possible.
Also, compilers get better, which again takes some of the load off the
programmer.

IN fact, for many purposes, less efficient languages are gaining rapidly
in popularity (java, perl, python, scheme, what have you). You lose a
lot of efficiency by leaving memory management etc. up to an
interpreter, but it's now practical to do so because the difference
between a program that executes in .001 seconds and one that executes in
.01 seconds may not be noticeable, and will be even less noticeable next
time you upgrade your system, but the difference between spending 10
hours coding and spending 1 hour coding will always be very noticeable.



-------------------   paul winkler   --------------------
slinkP arts: music, sound, illustration, web design, etc.

zarmzarm@erols.com      http://members.tripod.com/~slinkP