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From: Daniela <dgw@liwest.at>
To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr>,
	Chris Pressey <cpressey@catseye.mine.nu>
Date: Sat, 6 Mar 2004 11:25:47 +0000
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Subject: Re: FreeBSD Most wanted
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On Saturday 06 March 2004 03:19, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> Chris Pressey said on Mar  5, 2004 at 19:22:00:
> > On Sat,  6 Mar 2004 02:55:35 +0100
> >
> > Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> wrote:
> > > Daniela wrote:
> > > > I like doing AI programming, that's numbercrunching most of the time.
> > > >
> > > > A compiler can't, for example, know whether you need to have zero
> > > > returned from the atoi() function when the user entered nonsense. If
> > > > you don't need to check whether the user has entered a valid number,
> > > > you can do it *much* faster.
> > >
> > > Excellent example.  Here you're limited by the speed of the fingers of
> > > the user who's entering the data, so there's *absolutely no point* in
> > > optimising the atoi() function in this way.  (Or if you're reading from
> > > the disk, the disk I/O will be the bottleneck, though it's admittedly
> > > faster than fingers.)
> >
> > I don't understand your point... atoi() is not an I/O function.
>
> Where did the "a" in the "atoi" come from?
>
> The point is that some very slow i/o routine gives you an ascii string
> (that's the only reason you'd ever need to deal with an ascii string),
> and then the C library's atoi() converts that to an integer.  Now,
> what's the advantage of optimising atoi()?

It was just an example.