Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!taumet!steve From: steve@taumet.com (Stephen Clamage) Newsgroups: comp.std.c++ Subject: Re: design by committee (was: templates and exceptions in g++?) Message-ID: <533@taumet.com> Date: 1 Dec 90 23:36:23 GMT References: <1016@zinn.MV.COM> <1990Nov23.211727.2802@zoo.toronto.edu> <1990Nov25.161506.9659@tsa.co.uk> Organization: Taumetric Corporation, San Diego Lines: 17 tom@ssd.csd.harris.com (Tom Horsley) writes: >Maybe trigraphs were a good idea, they are not too hard to >implement in a compiler, but they are absolutely *miserable* to use. Trigraphs are not all that easy to implement efficiently, either; they really do slow down the compiler. The scanner, which dominates compiler front-end time, requires 3-character lookahead, not to mention complicating the interpretation of end-of-line for finding the ends of macros. Our original straightforward implementation of trigraphs caused a 15% slowdown of the compiler front end. We spent quite a bit of time finding an efficient way to handle them, and reduced the overhead to about 5%. Please note this affects every program ever compiled, even ones which contain no trigraphs. -- Steve Clamage, TauMetric Corp, steve@taumet.com