I could probably say the same kind of things for GfA Basic on atari
ST, where some programs ran faster in interpreted basic than in C. The
reason is simple: most of the time is spent on FP ops because they are
simulated and FP-ops simulation takes a lot of time (bit-twiddling,
..). And the GfA Basic used a special FP encoding (48bits), whereas C
compilers always stick to IEEE.
It's like comparing a sed-script with a C-written equivalent program:
the interpretive overhead is likely to be low because of the high
level of the basic operations.
Stefan
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