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Subject: Re: Simple optimization question

Author: Tord Romstad

Date: 05:34:05 01/09/04

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On January 09, 2004 at 08:14:05, Ricardo Gibert wrote:

>If the if-test is seldom executed or the if-test is predictable, why should you
>optimize it? Use a profiler to determine what "needs" optimizing. Even then,
>think twice before you mangle the readability of your code.

I'm quite well aware of all of this.  If you browse the archives, you will
probably find that there are few programmers here who warn about premature
opitimization more often than I.  :-)

Have a look at this message for the most recent example:

http://www.talkchess.com/forums/1/message.html?340567

However, in the present case readability is not a major concern for me.
One of my plans for the not very distant future is to throw away my
current evaluation function entirely, and design some sort of high-level
language for defining the evaluation function.  I will then write a Lisp
program to transform this evaluation function to C code.  If this works
as well as I hope, I will never again have to read or write a single line
of C code in my evaluation function, and I am free to choose the low-level
constructs which give the fastest code, without worrying about readability.

I hate working in low-level languages like C, C++ and assembly language,
and prefer to let a program do the dirty work of churning out the most
complicated bits of the code rather than doing it all by hand.

Tord




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