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Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2004 20:22:59 +0200 (EET)
From: Narvi <narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee>
To: Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk>
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On Sat, 6 Mar 2004, Colin Percival wrote:

> At 21:44 06/03/2004, stephan mantler wrote:
>  >Also, to get a bit closer to the original topic. I can't remember where I
> >read this (DDJ probably), but apparently programmers who have a deep
> >understanding of computer architecture through low level programming also
> >produce "better" code in high level languages. My interpretation is that
> >they are simply feeding the compiler a better foundation to work with.
>
>    Having seen quite a lot of undergraduate "computer science" students
> over past decade, I can certainly support that interpretation.  Nobody
> quite understands why hash tables are not a perfect data structure
> until they've tried to implement one in assembly language.  (And, after
> performing such a task, few people will use hash tables without asking
> themselves, at least for a moment, if there might be a cheaper solution
> to the problem at hand.)

yeah, so they go for a simple singly linked list instead :(

hash tables are a very non-trivial data structure, and the majority of way
of implementing them are really gross from the point of view of having a
deep memory hierarchy.

>
> Colin Percival
>