On 4/8/2011 4:11 PM, Robert A. Rosenberg wrote:
The assembler programmer grabs his Knuth book....
Or he digs into his tool box and pulls out a subroutine to do it
(ie:
The equivalent of your OS/PD implementation). If the C
Programmer is
allowed to cheat by using a pre-existent and debugged set of
code (in
lieu of creating it from scratch), so can the Assembler Programmer.
Remember you say experienced with means that the Assembler
Programmer
has code that can be reused/recycled.
Funny that this should get mentioned again so soon (last
reference on IBM-MAIN recently). I was a contractor at a
government agency circa 1997; one of the programs I was assigned
to look at reads hundreds of millions of records, and extracts
information using an insertion sort. I grabbed my Knuth volume
3, and wrote a routine using the balanced sort algorithm (and
cell pool services to reduce STORAGE overhead). Performance
improved significantly. The only downside was that Knuth left
the sequential extraction of data, once the tree is finished, as
an exercise for the reader. Doing that efficiently took more
time than implementing the tree sort.
Gerhard Postpischil
Bradford, VT
