Editing ABC 800 (section)

==Performance==
In order to see how the ABC 800 would compare to other contemporary personal computers, in 1982, the Swedish magazine ''[[MikroDatorn]]'' used the [[Rugg/Feldman benchmarks]] of eight short BASIC programs (BM1 - BM8) defined by the American [[Kilobaud Microcomputing|Kilobaud Magazine]] and routinely used by the British magazine [[Personal Computer World]] for testing new machines. 

The result was that ABC 800's semi-compiling BASIC interpreter turned out to be faster than most other BASICs used in popular machines, especially when [[integer]] variables are used, the results for some well known computers were as follows (times in seconds):

                            BM1   BM2   BM3   BM4   BM5   BM6   BM7   BM8
 ABC 800 (integer)         ''not measured - see [[ABC 80]] for approximate numbers''
 ABC 800 (single precision) 0.9   1.8   6.0   5.9   6.3   11.6  19.6  29
 ABC 800 (double precision) 1.2   2.2   10.0  10.6  11.0  17.8  26.4  144
 
 IBM PC                     1.5   5.2   12.1  12.6  13.6  23.5  37.4  35
 Apple III                  1.7   7.2   13.5  14.5  16.0  27.0  42.5  75
 VIC-20                     1.4   8.3   15.5  17.1  18.3  27.2  42.7  99
 ZX81 in "fast mode"        4.5   6.9   16.4  15.8  18.6  49.7  68.5  229

As seen from the table, the ABC 800 was approximately twice as fast as the IBM PC on [[floating point]] calculations, except for BM8 where it was only 20% faster. Using [[integer]] [[Variable (programming)|variables]] (only measured for the older [[ABC 80]] in this test) the numbers would be approximately 2-3 times as low (i.e. speeds 2-3 times as high) as for the [[single precision]] results in the table.