On Sat, 2 Dec 2006 19:39:34 +0100 (CET) Daniël Mantione <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> However, assembler coded is not portable. A hand optimized Pascal > based solution with goto statements might be preferable over assembler > code. For example, in the file rtl/unix/video.pp , the procedure > update_vcsa uses a goto for speed reasons. Yes... I understand that, of course. But my arguments against this are: 1) Except the compiler writers, few people know what code is generated for which source (should they know?). How do I know that a goto is really translated as a jump? I'm no expert, I did see that in many cases ifs, cases, whiles etc, are sufficiently 'recoded' by the compiler such as to make it difficult to garantee that (or know if) the goto is reached fast enough to matter. 2) Compiler semantic analysis is evolving (I imagine), so I'd suspect that optimising is also improving continuously... 3) I also believe that gotos are somewhat like guns. If they're available, it's more probable that people shoot themselves in the foot (or worse). Mind, I don't want to remove gotos. I'm all for free choice. But I'm still very much a proponent to discourage its use for fledgling programmers. John _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
