Re: [MacPerl] [ALBOT] Mac Y2K Oops?

[Richard Gordon <gordon@mindspring.com>]

On 2/9/1999 at 08:40, pudge@pobox.com (Chris Nandor) wrote:

> Anyway, the moral is that you can do most of what you need to on old
> computers.  I need a 292 MHz machine for Virtual PC.  Compiling stuff in
> MPW and CodeWarrior is a lot faster too.   In most apps, I notice very
> little difference between this PowerBook and the 7100.

At least with MacPerl, using a slow machine adds a margin of safety. I was
trying to manipulate some text files by reading them in, messing with the
contents and writing the results out to new files in another folder. Thru native
stupidity, I got into an infinite loop that just wrote out the html header and
it took me about 45 seconds to figure that out and kill the script. In that
time, MacPerl had created a 110 meg file (even using UltraSlow scsi!) and if I
had gotten on the phone or otherwise been too distracted to notice, I have no
doubt that the disk would have filled up completely and then who knows how bad
it would get?

Intrigued, I timed a simple finder copy of this same roque file from one
partition to another and found that this took 154 seconds. Since MacPerl did the
same thing (sort of) in 30% of the time, that says a lot about how lame the
finder is (even in OS8.5.1) and how fast risc can be when used for low level
stuff. If I had been running MacPerl on a G3, I would guess that the file would
have been to 110 megs in well under 15 seconds and the machine would have blown
out when the disk filled up in less than a minute. Be thankful for slow things.

Richard Gordon
Gordon Consulting & Design
Voice: 770-565-8267  Fax: 770-971-6887



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