On Tuesday 09 December 2003 11:08 am, Charles Steinkuehler wrote:

> Jared wrote:
> > Why Forth? Does FORTH produce tighter executables?

Clearly, a compiled program is going to be tighter than a shell script.   But 
if compact is what you're after, what about assembler?

There's an intermediate step that used to be very common among BBS software.  
The configuration files were typically plain text (a-la berkeley bbs), but at 
run time the main program would check them for changes and if they had been 
modified it would compile them into the binary files that actually controlled 
the options and operation.

Taking this another step, there is a compiler that will take a DOS batch file 
and compile it into a nice tight binary executable.

I wonder how much faster a Sys V system (like RedHat or Mandrake) would boot 
if all of the startup scripts were binary?