July 29, 2007
OK the first article was a classic... but really my comment is "Huh?" Is this Geek Central now?
And I'm glad he made the exception for "plain machine code."
Back in the day when I was an assembly language programmer doing real-time process control, time was of the essence. (On one project we put some of the logic in silicone because we had 52 milliseconds to make a decision and take action).
Case statements are beautiful, and easy to understand (and maintain) but most compilers hide how they actually construct the code, and the constructed code does contain machine-level GOTO statements. Editing things to put the most probable occurrence first can shave seconds off execution time. And seconds can make a difference in the real world.
One of the worst things the intraw3bs have done is make everyone except SLOW response times. I suppose Microsoft has helped with that. 0.5 second response time to live user was generally our design criteria. It takes Windows 0.5 seconds to figure out what you just double-clicked on.
Posted by: Zendo Deb at July 30, 2007 08:03 AM