Posted By
Litwr
on 2021-07-10
03:05:08
|  Re: A new utility that helps handle Basic strings
Thank you for your remark. IMHO the category "Utility/Programming" (sl/305) is a good place for this utility and it is actually placed there.
I made this utility because I wanted to test how good were the best sorting programs for the c64 from the 80s - the details are here (https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=77937).
BTW testing on the C64 shows that C64 Basic has a very poor garbage collector. One even call it buggy because it effectively prevents the intensive use of strings. For example, the C64 needs almost 2.5 hours (150 minutes!) just for filling a test array of 4000 strings! The C+4 needs only about 10 minutes for this task, it can fill 5500 strings (this is its memory limit) for only 13 minutes. So I can't help but admire people efforts that made Basic 3.5 so much better than C64 Basic.
EDIT. Everything has its price. The better C+4 garbage collector requires two more bytes for every string. It was my miss that I didn't correct those additional bytes after sorting. I just used the C64 code which doesn't require such a correction. :( Now C+4 is fixed and I was even able to make it slightly faster. BTW maybe we need one more software category - Utility/Basic-Programming ? We have a lot of tools which enhance Basic somehow.
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IMHO it is the fastest string sorting utility in the whole 8-bit world.
