Re: Review of sort

[Mark Crispin <mrc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 22 Nov 2006, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
> Speed. I'm not being facetious. There are cases where string equality 
> testing is a big performance bottleneck, enough that it's bothersome. 
> In my GUI-programming past I've had to optimize such things before in 
> order to get a decent UI feel. I could implement i;unicode-casemap fast 
> enough that on modern CPUs it outruns RAM/L3 cache. A really good 
> programmer might be able to optimise i;basic that well, but I don't 
> know how, and even it so, I don't think we should rely on people being 
> much smarter than I am.

I agree with you on all points here.  I know how to write a good 
performing implementation of i;ascii-casemap and i;unicode-casemap 
(because I've done it).  I don't know how to do so for i;basic, although I 
hope to acquire such knowledge eventually.

I also believe that for a specification to be viable, we should not rely 
upon people being as smart as we are, much less smarter.  Substitute 
"[more] educated" or "[more] experienced" for "smart[er]" if you wish.

We used to mock high school kids whose introduction to computing was with 
BASIC (ignoring the small detail that many of us were that too!); but 
sadly its replacement hasn't resulted in better education of programming, 
design principles, or architecture.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.