old habits are hard to break

[Mark Wilcox]

Richmond wrote:

> Well that is rather the same as my being extremely mean when removing 
> the core of a green pepper,
> cutting as near to the stem as possible, because at one time in my life 
> I was really living on the edge,
> financially (when I was in the USA); while now I can both afoord lots of 
> green peppers and live in
> a country where they are super abundant.

It's not exactly the same though. With a physical thing like a green pepper, cutting nearer the stem will always get you more to eat. Micro-optimisations to code are dependent on assumptions about underlying compilers/interpreters and hardware and so generally best avoided until required.  A good example from this thread is having four different versions of the same function with tiny variations at the beginning. One of the key bottlenecks in a modern device (desktop or mobile) is the speed of the RAM vs the speed of the processor; if your whole program doesn't fit in the CPU caches then splitting out function variants can actually make things slower, due to the need to fetch a different variant from RAM (or even disk or flash memory) vs having a single longer version that remains in cache.  Combine that with the fact that you then have to maintain multiple versions of the same code and we have a good example why "premature optimization is the root of
 all evil" (Donald Knuth).

Most people use very high level languages like LiveCode to optimise for code clarity, simplicity and readability - certainly not performance.

Maybe the old habits are worth the effort required to break them?

Mark