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From: nowias00@marvin.informatik.uni-dortmund.de (Mark Nowiasz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.beta
Subject: Re: BETA questions
Date: 20 Apr 1995 11:15:36 GMT
Organization: CS Department, University of Dortmund, Germany
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: Typical programs nowadays spend most of the time not in CPU but waiting
: for
: external events/devices (disk IO, user input, network ...). So even if
: there
: is a significant difference in the efficiency of compiled code you won't
: recognize this difference. That's why I've taken as a reference the BETA 
: compiler which is also a program generated by the BETA compiler.

IMHO may this kind attitude be responsible for large and inefficient programs
and operating systems (like Windows >:-> ).

Besides, if effiency considerations are considered to be less important, why
are there so many books and lectures about efficient algorithms ?

: I guess that the generated code might be several times slower than that
: generated by a good C/C++ compiler -- but you won't recognize the
: difference unless you consider heavily cpu bound programs like numerical
: computations.

These days, where GUIs are very complex and user-friendly, most of the
program's code is dealing with the user's input / output and takes often
quite a lot of time (in extreme cases most of the time )
(i.e. redrawing / refreshing / resizing windows resp. window's contents),
so for most non-trivial problems efficiency considerations have to be taken.

It's not very pleasant for an user to wait several seconds before a window
is build or refreshed.

--
        Mark

===============================================================
Mark Nowiasz         nowias00@marvin.informatik.uni-dortmund.de
Kronenstrasse 3
44625 Herne
Germany

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