On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 02:31:10PM -0700, Rod Roark wrote: > On Friday 16 June 2006 14:21, Micah J. Cowan wrote: > ... > > Optimization should always happen after implementation. > > No generalization is worth a damn, including this one.
Absolutely. And, in fact, I think that phrase (the one I just wrote a moment ago...) is a bit simplistic and overused without qualification. The truth is, if you know two ways to do something: an easy one that's exponential-time, and a /slightly/ harder one that's linearythmic, by golla, you'll do the linearythmic one... especially if you can pretty much count on it being used frequently. I think the thing you really want to warn against is nit-picky optimizations that have exactly the same complexity (as denoted by the Big Theta notation), but that just tweak the constant term, or the constant multiplier by a negligible amount. But "Optimization should happen after implementation" is quicker to say, and is a good rule-of-thumb at any rate... :-) -- Micah J. Cowan Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer... http://micah.cowan.name/ _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech