old habits are hard to break

Richmond richmondmathewson at gmail.com
Thu Jun 20 15:30:49 EDT 2013


On 06/20/2013 10:22 PM, Dr. Hawkins wrote:
> OK, we're well into the 21st century.
>
> I'm on a multi-core, multi-gigahertz machine.
>
> Yet I keep trying to optimize away single lines of code, to the point
> that I had four versions of some of my functions to avoid a little
> switch at the start to set a word or two into a variable, instead
> hard-coding it.
>
> It's all a hangover from the limits of 8 bit BASIC . . . (but at least
> I've accepted that I can jump to any point in the code at the same
> speed, instead of having faster jumps to early in memory as it
> searches . . . [That mattered in MBASIC below version 5 {but then,
> that's why my BASIC & FORTRAN always looked more like C or Pascal than
> spaghetti . .}])
>

Some of those habits are not necessarily  a bad thing as not all of your 
end-users are
going to have the "all-singing, all-dancing machine" you obviously have!

I am feeling "dead special" over here in Bulgaria as I have a dual processor
DELL Optiplex 745, whcih was the "latest thang" about 4 years ago; and 
that is
by far my fastest and most powerful machine. I work on the basis that
end-users of my Devawriter Pro are bashing away on a Pentium 3 running
Windows XP, or a G3 iMac running Mac OS 10.4.11, or an equivalent
"heap of junk" running some sort of Linux with LXDE as a window manager.

Richmond.




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