Assembly or ....

[Fraser Orr]

In article <1434 at zen.UUCP> frank at zen.co.uk (Frank Wales) writes:

[My comments on the relative merits of optimisers and hand crafting]

>Which means that, if you always want good work done, you'd better use
>people for some of it.  [Sound of foot being shot in background.]

Ouch (sound of me being shot in the foot:^)
No that is not what I'm getting at at all Frank. What I'm saying is
tha programmers are good at some things (like local, domain specific
optimisations) whereas programs are good at others (such as optimal
register usage, common expression elimination etc). Unfortunately
the two are not compatible, that is, when the optimiser has munged
your code, it is pretty hard for the programmer to further optimise
becase it is so seriously ununlike the original.
What I was trying to say is that on balance they are about equal
(he says with no evidence whatsoever to support him), and I'd prefer
to get the compiler to do the dirty work. My time costs money y'know.

>Frank Wales, Software Consultant,    [frank at zen.co.uk<->mcvax!zen.co.uk!frank]


==Fraser Orr ( Dept C.S., Univ. Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK)
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