David Fontaine <dav### [at] faricynet> wrote:
: I was thinking, not compiling it to machine code, but compressing the text.

  Machine code and byte-code are different things.
  Well, yes, they are very similar. The difference is that machine code is
the one that the processor reads directly (the textual representation of
machine code is called assembler (or assembly, I'm not sure)). Byte-code is
similar to machine code, but it's interpreted by the program. Byte-code has
more freedom on what commands you can implement and what things it can do.
You can put support for very application-specific commands in your byte-code
interpreter; this is not usually possible with machine code. The avantage
of byte-code over interpreted source code is speed.

  Compressing the text has little effect in speed. It may have some minor
speed improvement since you don't have to compare 8 characters but just 2,
but in the average the speed improvement will probably be very small. The
length of the keywords, identifier names and so on is not so important.
  Parsing and interpreting a file doesn't need string search. Even when
you are looking for several keywords which have an identical beginning
(such as int, interior, interpolate, intersection, intervals) you only have
to go through the text once, without having to go back and forth.

-- 
main(i,_){for(_?--i,main(i+2,"FhhQHFIJD|FQTITFN]zRFHhhTBFHhhTBFysdB"[i]
):_;i&&_>1;printf("%s",_-70?_&1?"[]":" ":(_=0,"\n")),_/=2);} /*- Warp -*/

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