Author: martin fierz
Date: 04:03:23 01/09/04
Go up one level in this thread
On January 09, 2004 at 06:46:00, Tord Romstad wrote: >By reading this forum, I've understood that "if" statements are considered >evil and that it is often a good idea to remove them if it is possible. Suppose >that I have code which looks like this: > >if(x) y += 20; > >Would it then be advantageous to rewrite the code like this? > >y += (!(!x))*20; > >In my evaluation function, I have a lot of conditionals which could be avoided >by >using tricks similar to the one above, but before doing it I would like to make >sure it is really a good idea. After all, the first form above is much more >readable. > >Tord don't do it! even if this happened to be faster - which i don't think - having readable code is much more important IMO. i believe most chess programs are limited by bugs in their playing strength, not by speed. 10% more speed is worth a handful of elo at best, not spending time on studying obfuscated code and not having bugs is worth much more than that! cheers martin
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