Date: Sat, 6 Mar 2004 11:23:09 +0000 From: Daniela <dgw@liwest.at> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD Most wanted Message-ID: <200403061123.09764.dgw@liwest.at> In-Reply-To: <1078538135.40492f9742e70@imp4-q.free.fr> References: <20040306012556.GA2554@online.fr> <200403060245.05790.dgw@liwest.at> <1078538135.40492f9742e70@imp4-q.free.fr>
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On Saturday 06 March 2004 01:55, Rahul Siddharthan 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 mean, it could be read from anywhere. A pipe, memory, cache, ...
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