In the replies underneath, someone ran it on a real Acorn Electron computer (6502 at 1 MHz), where it completed in 8 hours and 40 minutes. Not too bad really.
Intel's optimization manual has suggestions for fast versions at 15.12.3 (recommended by @James https://stackoverflow.com/a/2637823/10981777) Don't look especially long to implement for 22-bit approximation.
https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/downloa...
Also, what's the SQRD? Not finding that referred to anywhere.
What a nightmare to read though if you don't know what it's supposed to be written like. Is it a: "FORM=" or a "FOR M=" ? Is it: "S GNU:G", "SG NU:G", "SGN U:G"? SQRD totally looks like some special kind of square root implementation.
Because BBC Basic had a built-in assembler it was pretty uncommon for BBC programs to inline machine code as raw data (unlike some other computers from BITD).
i thought they had to be, running on processors with that little memory. though later on i learned about forth, which is surprisingly efficient for an interpreted language
a more likely explanation is that sophie wilson was just a better hacker than bill gates and paul allen
I loved it at the time, and the more I think back on it the more impressed I am. Like it had a very decent suite of floating-point routines, which if I remember right were very performant. In a 32KB ROM!