Mark & Juanita (in ) said:

| My first assignment out of college was writing TI-9900 Assembly
| code for embedded test equipment control. My last contribution to
| that assignment was the hardware and software design for a specific
| test box; so I do understand the speed efficiency and the ability
| to do device control quickly. However, after becoming an analyst
| and systems engineer, I have decided that speed of execution for
| many applications is way low in importance relative to speed of
| coding. For example, at a higher level than even Fortran or C, how
| long do you think it would take to program the following in
| assembly code?
|
| fid = fopen(filename, 'r');
| y = fread(fid);
| fclose(fid);
|
| x = length(y);
|
| figure(1);
| plot(x, y, '-xr');
| title('Data Plot');
| xlabel('Data Point Number');
| ylabel('Data');
|
| After doing that, I decided I really don't like writing "for"
| loops

Hmm. Two minutes? I'm assuming that the functions invoked have already
been programmed - if not, then add an hour.

Just by accident, I happened to have these on-line:

http://www.iedu.com/mrd/c/plot_pkg.c

and

http://www.iedu.com/mrd/c/PCHR.ASM

The first will plot your graph on an Epson FX-80 (the title and label
functions are in another file, not on-line), and the second is for a
CP/M putchar-like function. fopen(), fread(), and fclose() are
similarly quick and easy. g

You didn't specify what figure() does, so I didn't include it in the
estimate.

Optimizing compilers have pretty much eliminated the assembly language
performance advantage...

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto