A note for those not consumed by efficiency worries

[Ge' Weijers]

ruud at targon.UUCP (Ruud Harmsen) writes:

>In article <1990Mar22.072712.10902 at diku.dk> jensting at skinfaxe.diku.dk (Jens Tingleff) writes:
>>
>>	MAKE THE THING WORK, THEN MAKE IT FAST.
>>
>True.  But only with one very important footnote:

>While making the thing just work, do consider performance, and know where and
>how you might want to optimise later.
>If in the design of a programme or system you totally disregard all
>performance issues, you might have to rebuild large parts from scratch,
>and/or make the whole thing totally incomprehensible when optimisizing.

>I've seen things like that happen, and I can tell you it's a tragic sight
>to watch.  A much better approach is to have the spots for optimization
>marked and planned, so it is easy to fulfill, will be really effective
>and does not violate the original design.

I have to second that. You have to look at the feasibility of what you are
doing. If your solution of a problem is O(e ** N) for large N, look for a
better solution.

You still need to do some rough calculations.
Ge' Weijers                                    Internet/UUCP: ge at cs.kun.nl
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science,   (uunet.uu.net!cs.kun.nl!ge)
University of Nijmegen, Toernooiveld 1         
6525 ED Nijmegen, the Netherlands              tel. +3180612483 (UTC-2)