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From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Computers for users not programmers
Message-ID: <3198@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 14 Feb 91 14:02:15 GMT
References: <1991Feb12.181720.26323@eagle.lerc.nasa.gov> <14390@lanl.gov>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 26

In article <14390@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:

| Well, many character functions can be carried out on the Cray very
| fast.  I've implemented move, translate (like upper- to lower-case),
| scan (for first occurrence of a given character), etc..  They all
| work on vectors full of packed characters.  The asymptotic speed
| (speed of operation ignoring setup time) varies depending on the
| operation being done.  

  Without taking away from the value of what you've done, the world
doesn't ignore setup time. Typical things like searching a 20-50
character input line for a colon don't tkae long, and therefore the
setup time is important. That type of thing is a lot more prevalent in
the applications I've seen than scanning through a buffer measured in
kilobytes.

  We have an editor running on a Cray2, and when you do a lot of
searches and stuff it can be notably slow in terms of cpu used. And
while some cray2 only changes in the source could be made, the object of
portable code is to have the compiler do the machine specific stuff.

  Did you code your stuff directly in assembler?
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
  "I'll come home in one of two ways, the big parade or in a body bag.
   I prefer the former but I'll take the latter" -Sgt Marco Rodrigez