Path: utzoo!utstat!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!bfmny0!tneff
From: tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Cnews and old news
Message-ID: <15873@bfmny0.BFM.COM>
Date: 24 Sep 90 07:55:45 GMT
References: <26675@mimsy.umd.edu> <1990Sep23.042833.24834@zoo.toronto.edu>
Reply-To: tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff)
Lines: 21

In article <1990Sep23.042833.24834@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>Sigh.  Unfortunately correct.  The trouble is that getdate() is relatively
>costly and Geoff is reluctant to run it on every single article just on
>the off-chance that it might be too old.  

As currently written, getdate() is a marvelously general parser which
does a wonderful job in the general case but may be passing up an
opportunity for fast-parsing of the most common, well-behaved cases.
Might it be possible to add a 'fast check' for date strings of the form

	dd Mmm yy hh:mm:ss {GMT|EST|EDT|PST|PDT}

and bypass the complete state parser if this matches?  Surely 90% of
articles would pass the cheap test, and Cnews might then be able to
afford to check article dates during rnews processing.

Just a thought.

-- 
To have a horror of the bourgeois   (\(    Tom Neff
is bourgeois. -- Jules Renard        )\)   tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM