more questions about efficient C code
Jonathan P. Leech
jon at cit-vax.ARPA
Wed Jul 10 12:03:53 AEST 1985
> From: DHowell.ES at XEROX.ARPA
> ...
> Idioms which are believed to be more
> efficient (sometimes mistakenly) should be given up in favor of
> constructs which are common to most programming languages. I know that
> things can't be done the same in all programming languages, but what can
> be, should. It is simply a matter of making it understandable to all
> who are involved with a project, programmers and non-programmers alike.
>
> Dan
Would you then recommend that we eliminate pointers and structures
from our code? BASIC, FORTRAN and APL don't have them. I will place
myself out on a limb by stating that, in my experience,
non-programmers don't look at code and care that is WORKS, not how
elegant it is. I would hate to program in a common subset of all
languages. I far prefer to let the comments describe the algorithm and
the implementation be hand-optimized and obscure, if that makes it run
significantly faster. And sometimes it does. I've been doing a lot of
ray tracing recently, and at >8 hours frame, I CARE about efficiency!
Jon Leech
jon at cit-vax-arpa
__@/
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