C IF statement efficiency...

[Greg Limes]

In article <8808171400.AA05122 at ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> U23405 at UICVM writes:
>I was wondering if, of the two following program fragments, which one would
>be compiled more efficiently by most C compilers:
>
>          if (big > small)             if (big > small)
>               return big;                  return big;
>          else                         return small;
>               return small;

In article <566 at sybase.sybase.com>, ben at bosco (ben ullrich) writes:
>how about
>	return ((big > small) ? big : small)

>i don't know how efficient this is, but it is certainly more succinct than
>those suggested in the quoted text above.

All three of these examples reduce to the same thing quite early on in the
compilation; in fact, the compiler on my workstation (SunOS 4.0) produces code
for them that differs only in the names of some of the temporary labels used.
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