On Mon, 2003-09-29 at 20:01, Jacob Albretsen wrote:
> On Monday 29 September 2003 08:01 pm, Michael Halcrow wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 29, 2003 at 07:48:18PM -0600, District Webmaster wrote:
> > > Why would one wave a dead animal of any kind?
> >
> > If you have to ask, you'll never know.
>
> So anyone care to answer the question in plain English?
Ok. I'll play the scab.
wave a dead chicken: v.
To perform a ritual in the direction of crashed software or
hardware that one believes to be futile but is nevertheless
necessary so that others are satisfied that an appropriate
degree of effort has been expended. “I'll wave a dead chicken
over the source code, but I really think we've run into an OS
bug.” Compare voodoo programming, rain dance; see also casting
the runes.
http://www.faqs.org/docs/jargon/W/wave-a-dead-chicken.html
What I believe Jason was referring to was the premature optimizations
you were suggesting in your script. Inlining functions reduces
readability and often for no return. In your example, you do save the
memory of one variable to hold the result of the function call, but any
compiler worth its salt will optimize that variable away anyway.
Making premature guesses at what will improve speed and/or security
without really knowing how things work is therefore dead chicken waving
and hinders more than it helps.
Corey
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