ken@rochester.ARPA (Ken Yap) (03/19/87)
|With machine speed increasing all of the time, this argument is |becoming obsolete. Until we all have 20% of a 5 mips machine, it's Jon Bentley, in one of the programming pearls columns asks the reader to consider how much CPU time is saved compared to programmer time. I would guess the posted printf took more time to write than all the CPU time it will save throughout its entire lifetime. |On the other hand, there is another type of waste involved, and there |is an issue of portability. Which is why I won't use getopt in shell scripts even though it is tempting - I can't be sure it exists on every machine the shell script will be run on. Yes, there is a tradeoff, but the need has to be well documented before turning a shell script into C code. I think it was Rob Pike who noted that "ls | mc" where mc is a multi-column filter actually runs faster than the Berkeley "ls". I hate it everytime I do a "rsh ls" and forget to append -C! Ken