Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!gatech!uflorida!haven!ncifcrf!nlm-mcs!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Array indexing vs. pointers...
Message-ID: <8595@smoke.ARPA>
Date: 3 Oct 88 03:39:34 GMT
References: <8809191521.AA17824@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> <68995@sun.uucp> <934@l.cc.purdue.edu> <517@poseidon.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 11

In article <517@poseidon.UUCP> psrc@poseidon.UUCP (Paul S. R. Chisholm) writes:
>Moral:  A really good C programmer should know assembler language and
>compiler technology to write ordinary applications efficiently.

I have to disagree with this.  What is "efficient" for one implementation
may not be efficient for another, and most real C applications end up being
used with several different C implementations.  Low-level tweaking should
only be done when a specific implementation has unacceptable overhead in
some "bottleneck" code, and only after the algorithmic aspects of the
application have been made as good as possible.  Jon Bentley's book on
"Writing Efficient Programs" is recommended reading.