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From: ken@rochester.arpa (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Assembly language (was: Re: Another 1.3 wish.)
Message-ID: <1016@sol.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 3-Aug-87 18:17:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: sol.1016
Posted: Mon Aug  3 18:17:35 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 4-Aug-87 05:37:34 EDT
References: <8707190424.AA10158@cogsci.berkeley.edu> <434@sugar.UUCP> <3664@well.UUCP> <7197@think.UUCP>
Reply-To: ken@rochester.UUCP (Ken Yap)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 22

|The point is not that humans can do a better job, but whether they
|should bother.  The effort involved in converting a large program into
|assembly code can be enormous.  A program that takes more than a
|second to compile on a computer will probably take days or weeks for a
|person to translate, plus more time to debug it again to make sure the
|conversion was done right.  Is it worth it to get a tiny improvement
|in the code?  It also takes a pretty good programmer to beat the
|compiler; wouldn't his time be better spent designing or implementing
|the NEXT program?

Right on. In one of his Programming Pearls columns, Jon Bentley asks
the reader to estimate the cost in programmer wages of "improving" a
program by bit twiddling vs the cost of the CPU, etc, resources saved.

I suspect only heavily used programs like the kernel, compilers and
editors will pass this test. I know most of my programs wouldn't pass.

Of course, this is not to condone writing inefficient or unreadable
programs in the first place. In fact, one would save more (human)
resources later by writing clean programs.

	Ken