SPUG: Does Perl Scale? (Was: Evolution of Perl)

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2001 at 02:24:18PM -0700, Ken McGlothlen wrote:
>"Melissa D. Binde" <binde at terindell.com> writes:
>
>| It's important to not use that statement to justify "developers should never
>| have to write good code or optimize it, because hardware is always cheaper
>| than their time."
>
>It bears pointing out that ninety percent of speed issues aren't issues of
>interpreted vs compiled, nor is it compiler optimization or things like that.
>It's just badly swotted-up code.  I can't tell you how many times I've doubled
>the speed of someone else's program just by moving crap out of a loop that
>didn't have to be in there.  :)

The first programming job I ever did was on a Bendix G-20 mainframe in
FORTRAN involved lots of fresnel functions.  I cut the run time from 20
minutes down to under 2 by replacing one statement in a subroutine that was
executed 20,000 times per run where the engineer (I'm a scientist, not a
programmer), calculated the square root of PI/2 each time the subroutine
was called.  I just put it in common, and calculated it once in the main
program before starting the loop.  Of course compiler technology has
progressed a bit since the Bendix Mishawaka (sp?) FORTRAN of 1966, but the
principle's the same.

Bill
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