Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2004 22:19:54 -0500 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> To: Chris Pressey <cpressey@catseye.mine.nu> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD Most wanted Message-ID: <20040306031954.GA3713@online.fr> In-Reply-To: <20040305192200.7a377e92.cpressey@catseye.mine.nu> References: <20040306012556.GA2554@online.fr> <200403060245.05790.dgw@liwest.at> <1078538135.40492f9742e70@imp4-q.free.fr> <20040305192200.7a377e92.cpressey@catseye.mine.nu>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
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()? R
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20040306031954.GA3713>