On the same topic as last time, there's another good example of how assembling code at run-time can provide a worthwhile advantage. The x86 processor's division instructions are particularly slow, even on the newest CPUs, and it's common for modern compilers to convert division by a constant to a multiplication followed by a shift. If the multiplicand (which is effectively the reciprocal of the divisor, multiplied by a power of two) and the shift count are chosen carefully - and in some cases a final adjustment made - the result is identical to the division instruction but the speed is much faster.

The rub, of course, is that this technique is normally only applicable to division by a constant which is known at compile time. If you don't know what value you want to divide by until run-time you've got to use a conventional division instruction (strictly speaking if you know the divisor is one of a set of predetermined values you could select from a matching set of routines, or look up the multiplicand and shift count from a pair of tables, but that could eat up most if not all the speed advantage).

There's no such limitation in the case of BBC BASIC. Because the code is assembled at run-time the multiplication-plus-shift trick can be used for any divisor, so long as it remains unchanged for that particular run. For example you might want to divide by the screen width, a value which is constant at run-time but usually not known at compile time. The application would need to contain code for calculating the multiplicand and shift count from the divisor, but that is used only once during the initialisation phase of the program (in practice one would probably use an 'assembler macro' to do it).