begin  quoting Chuck Esterbrook as of Fri, Jan 25, 2008 at 01:30:56PM -0800:
[snip]
> A CS professor at Virginia Tech encouraged his students to not be shy
> about malloc'ing a large block and managing memory yourself when faced
> with the "many small mallocs" problem.

Yup.

Sun has a dtrace demonstration where they identified a problem as a
ton of tiny mallocs, and got some ridiculous speedup from fixing that
one little bit of code.

>                                        This a good example where C
> outshines Pascal where such an approach would be impossible.

Almost everything *should* outshine Pascal. Pascal is a language
designed for *teaching* programming concepts.

I can think of no better language for an introduction to programming,
where the concepts being taught include pass-by-reference versus 
pass-by-value, lexical scoping, problem decomposition by deriving
flowcharts and transforming flowcharts into code, etc. etc.

The fact that most serious programmers soon run up against its limitations
is a feature, not a bug! :)

-- 
Sometimes, you have to outgrow your tools
Child-safe spoons are for kids and fools.
Stewart Stremler

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