Thomas Lockhart wrote: > ... > > > > Hard to imagine why anyone would want such an optimization. How much > > > > faster could it possibly be? > > > Back in ye bad olde days, there was probably an order-of-magnitude > > > difference between the speed of a float multiply and that of a float > > > divide; so this used to be a pretty standard sort of optimization. > > > I can remember doing the equivalent thing by hand in source code. > > > On modern hardware I doubt it makes much difference... > > The speed difference is still there; you can't do a divide with one pass > through a barrel shifter, which is how the multiply operations were sped > up. I vaguely recall something like a 40:1 ratio on a 604 PowerPC but > that may not be accurate, or may be for integers which have similar > issues.
Wow, 40:1 is a major difference. > > And you would have to do a heck of a lot of them to see a difference. > > ?? Some applications *do* do a heck of a lot of them ;) Yep, I am sure. The question is whether there is ever a reason to use such a flag on the database code. My guess is no. -- Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us [EMAIL PROTECTED] | (610) 359-1001 + If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road + Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED])
