[dandrews]

It was pretty much taken as gospel everywhere at the time that NO compiler could match the speed and size of a well crafted assembly language routine. Back then there were some noble attempts at building optimizing compilers, and probably the more notable one was IBM's ambitious ForTran H. But that's 50-year-old tech now, kids.

Remember also that memory was at a terrific premium. I don't have any specific knowledge about the AGC, but there's an interesting story I read once about a memory shortage in another project - Intel's 8080.

(If you'll permit me an OT digression...)

As the story goes, the program space was so tight in the original microcode for the Intel 8080 microprocessor there wasn't room to spare for a one-byte constant in the code! The architects decided that the AAM and AAD instructions in the 8080 set should have a required operand - 0x0A or 10 - so that the instruction could refer to itself and know that you were operating in base 10!

A side effect of this is that the Intel processors could actually execute AAM and AAD instructions in number bases besides 10; Intel had never formally acknowledged that the instructions do this, and so in the NEC V20 or V30 chips - which were supposed to be Intel compatible - you couldn't change the AAM or AAD operand - it had to be 0x0A.

[AstroJetson]

This sounds interesting, any link to a second source on this?