I would certainly agree that in this particular application, where the "commands" are coming from a console of user interface of some sort, driven by a human, it matters little how fast the code is. I stand by my claim, however, that the compiler, no matter whose compiler it is, couldn't and therefore wouldn't produce code that's faster and smaller than the code a reasonably competent ASM programmer with some understanding of the environment he's programming would produce.

Yes, there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip, and few typical 'C' programmers (the sort that barely pass their 'C' class in college) are even reasonably competent programmers, regardless of the language, yet they all claim to be programmers. Since the compiler produces code with considerable, perhaps not vast amounts, but substantial amounts of overhead, I'd bet the code I write in ASM would be quite a bit shorter and faster than what an all-'C'-code program compiled with your favorite compiler would produce. I wouldn't bet that it would make a lot of difference in this application.

I've been considering using 'C' to produce those occasional non-environment-related routines that occasionally pop up ... you know ... calculating the Julian date once a day ... and other tasks where precise timing or speed isn't a factor. They can sometimes be quite a bit easier to create in 'C'.

Because I like to use table-driven dispatch routines in ASM, for speed and brevity, I'd probably write the MAIN component in ASM, and use compiled modules from the 'C' compiler as macros or subroutines. I'm not sure how easy that would be, however.

RE