> A story I've told here before is applicable (sorry if you've already
> heard it): FORTH, Inc. was asked to recode a baggage handling system
> for American Airlines. The original program was all assembler, and too
> expensive to maintain. We were required to reproduce the user interface
> and basic bag handling procedures, but could do whatever else seemed
> appropriate. Our program was written entirely in polyFORTH (ITC),
> running native on an LSI-11 (yeah, it was quite a few years ago). When
> it was sufficiently complete to run some timing tests, everyone was
> astonished: our system could handle 25%% more bags/minute than the
> previous one. polyFORTH was obviously not faster than pure assembler;
> the point was that our internal design was far more efficient than its
> predecessor.