fouts@orville.nas.nasa.gov.UUCP (09/01/87)
In article <1883@encore.UUCP> adamm@encore.UUCP (Adam S. Moskowitz) writes: > . . ., but why add the size limit? >Why kill yourself to deal with what many people feel is a bad hardware design? I do much of my work on a Cray 2. It has 2 gigabytes of REAL memory. I still try to write small programs. (Some are even under a gigabyte ;-) Seriously, small is something that a reasonable amount of effort should be put into achieving. Like most programming credos, it should be practiced in moderation, rather excess. When you can do it without destroying maintainability, you can accomplish: 1) Faster code. By taking the time to come up with a compact algorithm, you can usually find one faster than you were going to use in the first place. 2) Easier to understand code. This is only true if you try for moderation, but less code, if it is well thought out, means less to understand when trying to comprehend the program. 3) More useful code. The more people who can use your code, the better off you are. You can carry the less is more credo to far and get unmaintainable code. You can take memory is cheap to far and get unusable code. As always in engineering, truth lies in the middle ground, near the swamp. Marty
fpst@hubcap.UUCP (09/02/87)
in article <2640@ames.arpa>, fouts@orville.nas.nasa.gov (Marty Fouts) says: > 1) Faster code. By taking the time to come up with a compact ... > 2) Easier to understand code. This is only true if you try for... > 3) More useful code. The more people who can use your code, the > better off you are. The other caveat has to do with not completely confuting the optimization of the compiler. As we get further away from von Neumann architectures, the compiler will become more important as a tool past the "save me from the detail" genre. Now one doesn't know where or how invocation proceeds. Comments and/or proposals? -- Steve Stevenson fpst@hubcap.clemson.edu (aka D. E. Stevenson), fpst@clemson.csnet Department of Computer Science, comp.hypercube Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634-1906 (803)656-5880.mabell