Path: news.daimi.aau.dk!news.uni-c.dk!sunic!sunic.sunet.se!news.luth.se!eru.mt.luth.se!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!gatech!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!news.sprintlink.net!EU.net!Germany.EU.net!Dortmund.Germany.EU.net!Informatik.Uni-Dortmund.DE!marvin!nowias00 From: nowias00@marvin.informatik.uni-dortmund.de (Mark Nowiasz) Newsgroups: comp.lang.beta Subject: Re: BETA questions Date: 20 Apr 1995 10:54:53 GMT Organization: CS Department, University of Dortmund, Germany Lines: 58 Message-ID: <3n5eht$m2i@fbi-news.informatik.uni-dortmund.de> References: <3jq90s$ojp@belfort.daimi.aau.dk> NNTP-Posting-Host: marvin.informatik.uni-dortmund.de X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Wilfried Rupflin (wr@polly.informatik.uni-dortmund.de) wrote: : >I am considering the use of the BETA programming language because of it's : >elegance and expressiveness but I still have some questions regarding BETA's : >maturity. : At University Dortmund, CS dept., it was decided to introduce BETA : as the main language for teaching starting with the last winter term. : The beginner's introductory lecture (called Programming I) was : run with BETA. Surprisingly we had neither didactical nor technical : problems (with over 300 students!). I am one of those students who was forced to learn BETA and had to cope with severe flaws of BETA resp. the Mjoelnir BETA Compiler : - The (only yet existing) Compiler did NOT correctly implement the BETA language (no repetitions of static elements, one has to use (* instead of {, etc. ) - The compiler gave out (relatively useless) warnings ("a run-time check will be generated here") but stopped at real errors ("...stopped because of semantic errors") without any indication where the error occured. - BETA-programs are very large (> 250k even for a simple "Hello World" program) and REALLY slow (see below) >How fast is BETA (executable speed)...compared to Eiffel and C++? IMHO very slow... i'll show you one example: I've had to program a pattern in BETA which would compute recursively the numbers of Fibonacci's algorithm. This program was compiled and started on a SUN 4. Simultanously, i implemented this function in C++ on my Amiga A-1200 (with a 68EC020 14MHzm without a FPU). Not only that the Amiga programm was smaller (5 k compared to >250k BETA) but ran significantly _faster_ than the BETA-program on the SUN (which is certainly a _lot_ faster then my Amiga) -- Mark =============================================================== Mark Nowiasz nowias00@marvin.informatik.uni-dortmund.de Kronenstrasse 3 44625 Herne Germany __ __ _ ,--'--`--. _ ,--',_`--_____________ |_||____--____||_| |____|==___________----` (===(======)===) (====(==========/ \\ `--' // `--'\ / \\_ ,--, _// _,--\ /----._____ `-| |-' ,'_____\--/___________`---, `__' `-.____\___________,-----' Windows : from people who brought you edlin =============================================================