Quoted or unquoted literals

[Richmond Mathewson]

Well, as an educational content deliverer I try to make my programs run 
no faster than the
brains of my pupils/students;  mind you, in certain cases that is 
glacially slow.  :)

Years ago, on my Performa 475 things were great, I had time to takes 
gulps of coffee
between sentences in my Master's thesis (i.e. waiting for the stuff I 
had typed in
Clarisworks to show up on the screen); now I have to have a silly 
program that tells
me when to take a break!

And, I always use "btn", "img", "gc" and "fld", but "card" - don't quite 
know why,
but I find "cd" confuses me. Now that I find that using short-forms 
(err, or is it the other
way round) is going to make my stacks a milli-microsecond faster I will 
reform
myself, needless to say.

Brian Yennie wrote:
> I'm a bit skeptical that any such difference actually exists. Both the 
> short and long forms should map to the exact same compiled code. 
> Theoretically the long form would take longer to parse / compile the 
> first time, but we're talking about the parsing of individual 
> characters -- something that would have immeasurably small impact.
>
> When I run the benchmark, the faster method seems to depend on a 
> combination of which one appears first in the script and/or the 
> direction of the wind, and doesn't appear to be repeatable.
>
>> René Micout wrote:
>>> Jacqueline,
>>> You said yesterday (?) that using synonym like "cd", "btn", "fld" 
>>> is  slower than "card", button", "field". That is, I think, an  
>>> interesting problem because I use synonym every time...
>>> What is the difference (speed) ?
>>
>> Not enough to bother with, IMO.
>>
>> I ran this test:
>>
>> on mouseUp
>> put 100000 into n
>> --  Abbrev:
>> put the millisecs into t
>> repeat n
>>   set the uX of sb 1 to the text of fld 1
>> end repeat
>> put the millisecs - t into t1
>> -- Full:
>> put the millisecs into t
>> repeat n
>>   set the uX of scrollbar 1 to the text of field 1
>> end repeat
>> put the millisecs - t into t2
>> -- 
>> put "Abbrev: "& t1/n && "  Full: "& t2/n &\
>>     cr& "Difference: "& t1/n - t2/n
>> end mouseUp
>>
>> ...and got this result:
>>
>> Abbrev: 0.00213   Full: 0.00211
>> Difference: 0.00002
>>
>>
>> I'm normally quick to adopt habits which will optimize performance, 
>> knowing that every clock cycle saved is one I can put toward 
>> bullet-point features, but on this one the productivity loss of 
>> typing the full form for all object references isn't worth the 
>> 0.00002 millisecond to me.
>>
>> No doubt this difference would be much greater if one were doing this 
>> in a "send", "do" or "value" call because those need to run through 
>> the compiler in each iteration.  But for that reason I use those as 
>> seldom as possible anyway;  the overhead of using "send" is orders of 
>> magnitude more than the overhead of using abbreviations.
>>
>> It's still not the end of the world to use "send", and when you need 
>> it you need it.  But avoiding "send", "do", or "value" where 
>> practical will save you much more time than avoiding abbreviations.
>>
>> Besides, with "dispatch" and behaviors in v3.5 I rarely use "send" 
>> these days.  "Dispatch" is similar to send in many ways, and AFAIK it 
>> still needs to be runtime-compiled, but something about it is 
>> optimized so that it benchmarks at least 30% faster.
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