Chapter 9. Ten Pounds in a Five-Pound Sack

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The author should gaze at Noah, and . . . learn, as they did in the Ark, to crowd a great deal of matter into a very small compass.SYDNEY SMITH, EDINBURGH REVIEW

Program Space as Cost

How big is it? Aside from running time, the space occupied by a program is a principal cost. This is true even for proprietary programs, where the user pays the author a fee that is essentially a share of the development cost. Consider the IBM APL interactive software system. It rents for $400 per month and, when used, takes at least 160 K bytes of memory. On a Model 165, memory rents for about $12 per kilobyte per ...

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