On 2007-09-10 04:38:26 -0400, James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com> said:

> On Aug 30, 5:42 am, Jerry Coffin <jcof...@taeus.com> wrote:
>> In article <1188413857.173394.309...@19g2000hsx.googlegroups.com>,
>> spekyu...@gmail.com says...
>
>
>> The first advice I'd give is to NOT consider efficiency (at least as
>> most people use the word) as a top priority. Efficiency is rarely as
>> valuable as readability.
>
> Note that the real problem isn't the word "efficiency"; it's
> what the word is applied to. Increasing programmer efficiency
> should be a top consideration.
>

In almost all contexts. But if I'm selling a commercial library, I have
to pay a great deal of attention to the speed and memory usage of the
code, because customers won't want to or perhaps won't be able to fix
performance bottlenecks in my code. Your later example of a function
that took seven seconds to copy its return value is a good one: you
knew that it was only called a few times in several hours, but the
writer of a general-purpose library doesn't have that information and
probably can't impose that constraint on customers.

--
Pete
Roundhouse Consulting, Ltd. (www.versatilecoding.com) Author of "The
Standard C++ Library Extensions: a Tutorial and Reference
(www.petebecker.com/tr1book)