On Aug 1, 2006, at 9:45 AM, Joseph wrote:
This was just too good not to share. (Slightly Off Topic)
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v7i24_fallacy.html
I liked the article.
I don't think that I have fallen into this viewpoint (I believe in
performance optimization) except in new topics that I am learning or
with optimization techniques that I am not aware of. The funniest
part of the article (to me) is the part where he wrote: "they were
taught in their college Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis
course, that each statement in a program takes one unit of time to
execute". In my class, this is exactly how the book was written.
And although the professor did mention that each operation has
different execution times, he did not go into detail and I don't
think that most of the students understood his point.
For REALbasic, I think that low-level optimization is almost out of
our hands (unless you write a plugin). However, I believe that it is
important to understand exactly how expensive are the functions that
you call, and the advantages/disadvantages.
For example, using the "B" functions (such as InStrB) when
appropriate can increase performance. The advantages with the "InStr
()" is that it will make case-insensitive searches and will convert
encodings (if necessary) during the search. All of these extra
features are convenient, but are not necessary if you are doing case-
sensitive searches and you know all of the strings are using the same
text encoding.
But the important point from the article is that there is *no* reason
why REALbasic programmers cannot be optimizing code as they write
it. It would be nice if someone more experienced than I wrote an
article about practical REALbasic optimization techniques.
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