From: invalid AT erehwon DOT invalid (Graaagh the Mighty)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: DJGPP reserves wrong int size
Organization: Low Charisma Anonymous
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Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 09:02:21 GMT
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To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com

On Fri, 29 Jun 2001 21:19:07 -0400, Stan Moore <smoore AT exis DOT net> sat
on a tribble, which squeaked:

>If you find programming tools or other apps this difficult...

I don't. There are tools that are easier to use and tools that are
harder to use. I prefer the former; so sue me.

>You clearly have never read any of the standard...

And I don't plan to anytime soon, since it's not free(!) and is
written for language lawyers and not programmers. Unfortunately, there
seems to be an increasing disconnect between the legalese of the C/C++
standards and the real world, to such an extent that compiling and
running any nontrivial C++ app with templates forces you to concern
yourself with, and depend upon, the "unspecified behavior" (or was
that "implementation-dependent"?) of the linking and file management
internals.

>And people will continue to see Elvis too :)  Premature optimization
>causes more bugs and grief than any other single programmer activity.

Hmm?
So can postmature optimization, it seems. I wrote a fast algorithm for
something a while back. Died with allocation failure, and you know how
hard it is to do that on a modern machine in a paged environment! A
quick debug revealed it trying to allocate approximately 700 megabytes
of doubles and ints. A smarter one hand-optimized for space chopped
that to 10 or so, and wasn't even any slower.

>My only real point for delurking for this thread was to suggest Jon
>Bentley's Programming Perls

URL? And this isn't specific to "perl" the language is it?

>looking at 1's and 0's is "almost" never the best way to optimize a
>program.

If you're writing the compiler optimizer, it might be. :-)
Also if you're working on certain tree traversing problems...

Counting multiplies can be useful sometimes too.


-- 
Bill Gates: "No computer will ever need more than 640K of RAM." -- 1980
"There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of." -- 1980
"This antitrust thing will blow over." -- 1998
Combine neo, an underscore, and one thousand sixty-one to make my hotmail addy.