Announcing SPITBOL.WORDPRESS.COM, a New Blog About SPITBOL

I have just created a new blog at WordPress, SPITBOL,.

It is intended for the use of the SPITBOL community, and I hope that it willl evolve into a group blog, with most of the content coming from others.

I will continue publishing my writings on SPITBOL in this, my primary blog, daveshields.wordpress.com.

On Programming: SPITBOL is FUN

I just sent the following note to the SPITBOL group at Yahoo:

See my recent post, “On Programming: Moore’s Law and Software,”

https://daveshields.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/on-programming-moores-law-and-software/

It is based on the results from running a few simple programs comparing runtime performance of SPITBOL and Python, in which I learned that

# SPITBOL is five times faster than Python for integer arithmetic operations;
# SPITBOL is two times faster than Python performing floating point arithmetic;
# SPITBOL is 2.5 times faster than Python performing string operations;
# SPITBOL is seven times faster than Python calling procedures.

This suggests that the best way to improve the performance of Python code is to rewrite it in SPITBOL.

I expect this is also the case for programs written in other “scripting languages” such as Java, PHP, Perl and Ruby, for example.

SPITBOL is remarkable in that it is BOTH a high-level programming language and a high-level assembler language.

No other language can make this claim, or at least no other language has yet been so well implemented.

This comes as no surprise to those who, like myself and Gordon, have used SPITBOL.

No other language provides as much fun by the writing of programs in it than SPITBOL.

Every line is an adventure, an amusement, and a challenge.