Author: Travers Waker
Date: 05:38:43 10/10/01
Hi. I recently read that using word-sized variables for a particular machine (e.g. a 32-bit int on an Intel PC CPU) yields faster code than using variables that are not the size of a word. For example, I understood the article to be saying that if you needed an index, i, to access an array, A[256], then it would yield faster code to define: int i; instead of: unsigned char i; even though the unsigend char is big enough to be able to index all the elements of the array. I find this strange, especially since it seems to me that you waste space in the memory caches when the most sinificant 3 bytes of the 32-bit int are always going to be zero's. Can someone explain to me why using word-sized variables should be faster? Thanks Travers
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