Tom Marchant writes:
I seriously doubt that TRTO is faster than 50 compares on a modern
superscalar processor. I hope you mean faster by a factor of 10x,
not by a factor of 10k. The latter is absurd, the former unlikely.
in response to my
. . . Maintaining/replacing ad hoc code of this sort is a nightmarish job.
Replacing all of it with a single reentrant assembly-language subroutine
(and, usually, several different 64-kibibyte tables because different
'lines' may do business in different states) makes this job tractable; and
it speeds up the execution of these applications enormously, often by a
factor of more than 10k (sic).
Now 'sic' literally means 'thus' in Latin, and its standard use in English
and other European languages is to mark text that might otherwise be thought
to be corrupt as correct and intended.
I did not of course assert that one TRTO is faster than 50 compares,
although this is in fact the case; what I said was that certain American
insurance applications that made repeated, heavy use of state-code driven
if-then-else-if constructs were 10k faster after the replacement of these
sets of compares by (a single) TRTO-based numeric evaluation of one of the
two-character state-code values 'AK', . . . 'WY'. These programs were also
much smaller.
Mr. Marchant has a controversial style that is at once naif, uninformed and
rudely combative. It dismembers straw men from an assumed posture of unique
virtue. Disagreement, even strong, vigorously expressed disagreement, are
staples here. His modus operandi is not, need not and should not be.
Moreover, he is comnpulsively loquacious about too many topics. Justice
Holmes said that five generations of cretins were enough; and five all but
vacuous posts in the 'moving LOADxx' thread already this morning are too
many.
John Gilmore
Ashland, MA 01721-1817
USA
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