[vox-tech] a comment on Pete's fast-loop question

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Sun, Jun 18, 2006 at 11:44:19PM -0400, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> On Sun 18 Jun 06,  8:13 PM, Micah J. Cowan <micah at cowan.name> said:
> > Given your explanation above, you might also find Hacker's Delight
> > to be enjoyable reading (if you haven't read it already).
> > 
> > ...just promise me you'll document the hell out of pretty much anything
> > you /use/ out of there... :-)
>  
> You know... a long time ago I read a /. book review of this book and it's
> been in the back of my head for a long time.  I never had the money to
> purchase it (I think it's still on my nerdbooks.com wishlist).  You just
> reminded me of it.  Yeah, that's a book I can afford now; I think I'll take
> the plunge.
> 
> I set up a wiki on www.dirac.org/programming to document everything I learn
> about programming, numerics, and numerical algorithms.  Slowly but surely, a
> lot of my saved vox-tech messages (like this one) are getting documented
> there.  I also plan on documenting things I learn from books like Hacker's
> Delight.

I should also point out that it may be unwise to implement some of the
operations that book describes, that are already easily supported
through more conventional means. For instance: the book may have some
neat tricks for integer division, but the truth is that optimizing
such things is the compiler's job, and sometimes the compiler will know
better ways to do it (especially down the road in the future). Simpler
code is frequently the best approach, no matter what cool "tricks" you
know.

Some things, OTOH, such as bit-counting, or other "properties of a
value"-type evaluations, are much enhanced by exactly these sorts of
tricks.

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer...
http://micah.cowan.name/