mckeeman@wivax.UUCP (05/29/84)
>Some of the tradeoffs between clarity and efficiency in >programming were treated by Knuth in a Computing Surveys >article, "Structured Programming with GOTOs." It appeared >about 15 years ago. A curious follow-on to the Knuth article came from Toronto almost immediately thereafter. The stated but untested assumption of most everyone those days was that recursion was slow. The Toronto folks ran the Knuth examples in a bunch of languages in each of the Knuth iterated forms. In a large percentage of the cases the go-to versions were larger and slower than the recursive versions (sounds of amazement and wonder from the admiring crowd). I would not have been surprised on Burroughs equipment but this stuff ran on PDP-11 and IBM hardware. I have lost the reference but I'll bet Dave Wortman or Rick Holt could dig it out (Hi Dave, Hi Rick). /s/ Bill McKeeman.Wang-Inst at CSNet-Relay ...decvax!wivax!mckeeman Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, Tyngsboro, MA 01879
ron@brl-vgr.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>) (05/31/84)
Actually the introduction of non-structured constructs into structured programming is most often to save SPACE more than anything else. And just because you don't have goto's doesn't mean your code is structured. Most real programmers (which means people who are not just pinko computer science types writing code for example) don't use fully stuctured programming at all. -Ron