Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!me!zougas
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
From: zougas@me.utoronto.ca ("Athanasios(Tom) Zougas")
Subject: Re: a style question
Message-ID: <90Oct1.102559edt.18827@me.utoronto.ca>
Organisation: U of Toronto, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
Organization: Mechanical Engineering, U of Toronto
References: <7341@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <1990Sep30.050655.13212@zoo.toronto.edu> 	<1990Sep30.172917.2951@Neon.Stanford.EDU> <DAVIS.90Oct1025438@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 1 Oct 90 14:26:04 GMT

davis@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu ("John E. Davis") writes:

>In article <1990Sep30.172917.2951@Neon.Stanford.EDU> kanamori@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Atsushi Kanamori) writes:
>   >More usefully, "<" seems to be a more common idiom than "!=" in upward counting
>   >loops. So using "<" will probably shave a few microseconds off 
>   >the human reader's processing time.


>Which generates faster code?  It seems to me that it is easier to tell if two
>values are unequal than to tell if one is greater than the other.  I'd rather
>save the machine a few micro-seconds than myself since I only do the
>comparison once whereas the machine must do it many times.

You know what they say: "Computers are very good at doing things 
over and over and over again":-)

Shaving microseconds does not make better code. Better algorithms do.
(Definition of 'better' left to the reader as an exercise :-)

Tom.

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