On 24 October 2013 02:43, Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> The search may be terminated early (however infrequently) on
> discovering an exact match.  But this requires an extra comparison
> if ternary results are unavailable (as they are in assembler --
> is that sufficiently on-topic?)  The cost of that extra comparison
> is unlikely to be offset by terminating the loop early (usually only
> on the last iteration) if ternary comparisons are unavailable.
>
> From some code that I saw, it appeared that extra comparison was not to
improve performance but rather an assumed fix for using the wrong condition
for terminating the loop... But I have no right to speak after spending
several hours debugging a binary search and finding the input was not
sorted on that key ;-)

Rob

Reply via email to