Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!ucbvax!hplabs!pyramid!prls!flanner
From: flanner@prls.UUCP (Philip D. Flanner III)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: C vs. FORTRAN
Message-ID: <24633@prls.UUCP>
Date: 7 Aug 89 21:25:17 GMT
References: <3288@ohstpy.mps.ohio-state.edu> <225800204@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <14523@bfmny0.UUCP>
Reply-To: flanner@prls.UUCP (Philip D. Flanner III)
Organization: Philips Research Labs, Sunnyvale, California
Lines: 23

The usual efficiency vs timeliness, correctness etc battle is starting up
again; here are a couple non-anecdotal contributions:

A company paid me ~$2500 to write ~120 lines of code to perform a certain
function.  They already had an efficient, working version but it wasn't
fast enough, and they had to hire a consultant (me!) to squeeze the last
few microseconds out of it.  Why? because, although it was fast, it wasn't
fast enough to handle the data coming from the wingtip flight recorder.
Even worse, I coded it in assembler [gasp]!

I spent many days [at the behest of my employer] on a working program
(~8000 lines) trying to make it more efficient (only where it counted, 
in three routines totalling about 1/10 the whole program), because
the piece of equipment it controlled needed to have a <100 millisecond
control loop, otherwise it might just fly apart and hurt people.

Moral:  There ARE often reasons why efficiency is of paramount importance;
	just because you've never had to work on such a project doesn't
	mean there aren't a lot of them out there.  I also agree that a
	fanatic devotion to efficiency in cases where it is not important
	is just that : fanatic.

-- Phil Flanner   ..!philabs!prls!flanner  -or-  ..!decwrl!pyramid!prls!flanner