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From: Daniela <dgw@liwest.at>
To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr>
Date: Sat, 6 Mar 2004 11:23:09 +0000
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Subject: Re: FreeBSD Most wanted
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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, ...